A Consistency-Preserving Editing Model for Dynamic Filtered Engineering of Model-Driven Product Lines

The high cognitive complexity of model-driven software product line engineering is due to the fact that developers have to manually create, edit, and maintain multi-variant artifacts. As a solution, the adaptation of filtered editing has been proposed recently. Filtered editing can be applied in a static or in a dynamic way; in the latter case, new co-evolution problems occur when considering the evolving relationships between the historical, the variant, and the product dimension. This paper investigates, formally defines, and demonstrates by examples nine consistency constraints connected to dynamic filtered editing. Furthermore, we suggest a consistency-preserving editing model comprising four operations that synchronize a transparent multi-version repository with a single-version workspace view being presented to the user: check-out, modify, commit, and a novel operation, migrate, which prepares the workspace for the subsequent edit session. Several advantages of dynamic over static filtered or unfiltered editing are confirmed both on a theoretical and on an experimental basis.