Abstract Change Descriptions for Evolving Delta-Oriented Product Lines

In delta-oriented product lines, shared artefacts are reused across variants. Consequently, when a delta-oriented product line evolves over time, for the purpose of development, changes introduced in one variant may also a!ect other variants. Higher-Order Delta-Modelling captures the evolution of a delta-oriented product line as a whole, but does not explicitly describe which changes occur at the level of individual variants and how these changes a!ect the overall variant space, which makes it di”cult to assess the scope of an evolution. Furthermore, due to the nature of cyber-physical systems, the change description should be understandable across the domains involved, which requires the change description to be modelindependent. This thesis addresses this challenge by introducing model-independent change descriptors for delta-oriented product line evolution, which comprises two parts: Firstly, to describe the evolution of individual model variants, we introduce the variant change descriptor, for which we provide a formal definition and an according implementation for automated generation. Secondly, to describe the evolution of the model variant space, we propose the variant space change descriptor, for which we provide an aggregation-based and a direct calculation definition and implementation. ... mehrOur evaluation assesses the correctness of the variant-specific change calculations and the technical feasibility of the variant change descriptor and the variant space change descriptor. It also compares aggregation-based and direct calculations, considering whether redundant delta operations were taken into account and whether the weighting of each model variant has the same impact in both calculations.