Increasing efficiency and effectiveness of software product line evolution - an infrastructure on top of configuration management

Software Product Line Engineering entails the strategic development of software assets that are to be reused many times across the members of a product line. Assuring that the investment in reuse holds over time is an important requirement in this case. To that end it is necessary that evolution is carefully managed: Changes in reusable assets and their customized instances need to be tracked and propagated efficiently. Configuration Management is a mature discipline for that purpose. However traditional configuration management does not address product line evolution scenarios explicitly. Over time this can lead to great evolution management effort. This paper presents an infrastructure - in particular its validation - that sits on top of traditional configuration management and is tailored to evolution scenarios in Product Line Engineering. The result is a reduction of effort and an increase of correctness.