Change Propagation in Software Product Lines Using ACP Algorithm

Software product lines (SPL) has proven to be a successful approach in time to market and quality. SPL advantages do not come for free. They need a mature software engineering principles and systematic configuration management system. Configuration management (CM) is concerned with the tools, processes and policies for managing software systems. CM is important because it keeps track of what changes and component versions have been incorporated into each system version. CM for software product lines is not mature. In order to improve CM of SPL we proposed a versioning model and twenty three cases of change promulgation which include both forward and rearward change promulgation. In the present work, to increase the efficiency of change promulgation, changes are classified as major, minor and micro changes based on which the guidelines for forward change promulgation and rearward change promulgations are suggested. An Automated Change Promulgation (ACP) algorithm is proposed. The experimental results are encouraging by showing a performance increase of fifty percent over the existing methodology.