A proposal for organizing source code variability in the git version control system

Abstract

Often, either to expand the target market or to satisfy specific new requirements, software systems inside a company are cloned, refactored, and customized, generating new derived software systems. Although this is a practical solution, it is not effective in the long-term because of the high maintenance costs when maintaining each of these derived software systems. Software product lines (SPLs) were proposed to reduce these costs; however, the lack of integration between variability realization mechanisms and version control systems reduces its attractiveness in the software development industry, especially in small and medium software companies. In this paper we propose an approach to integrate the conditional compilation mechanism used to implement the SPL variabilities and the Git version control system used to manage software versions in order to increase the attractiveness of the SPLs in the industry. The proposed solution also could be seen as a method to manage software system families' evolution in space and time.