Similarity management of ‘cloned and owned’ variants (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

The ‘clone and own’ approach to software product lines assumes that variants are created by cloning and evolve more or less independently afterwards. We research the process to manage similarity of such ‘cloned and owned’ variants along the timeline. The process uses annotations for recording developer intentions and it leverages automatic change propagation. We have applied the process and corresponding tool support in a case study where we manage similarity for clowned-and-owned Haskell-based variants of a simple human-resources management system.