Structure-oriented product versioning

Abstract

Internal structures of software artifacts, especially program source code, are very important to software engineers in developing a high-quality software. However, many existing version control and configuration management systems often treat program source code as a set of text lines and disregard logical structure. This creates burdensome for developers since the evolution of program structures is not recorded. This makes not only the development but also the maintenance of software systems less efficient. This paper describes a novel approach to fine-grained version control of source code and structured documents, called structure-oriented product versioning. The approach enables flexible management of the evolution of fine-grained units at any structural level in a software document.