Product-line maintenance with emergent contract interfaces

Abstract

A software product line evolves whenever one of its products need to evolve. Maintenance of preprocessor-based product lines is a difficult task, as changes to the code base may unintentionally influence the behavior of uninvolved products. Hence, developers should be supported during maintenance. We present emergent contract interfaces to make product-line development more efficient and less error-prone. The key idea is that for a given maintenance point (i.e., an assignment), we calculate (a) features in the source code that may be affected and (b) assertions based on contracts defined in the code base. By means of a controlled experiment, we provide empirical evidence regarding efficiency and error-avoidance with emergent contract interfaces.