VariantSync

=== Automating the Synchronization of Software Variants ===

VariantSync is a tool to develop variants separately as in clone-and-own and to automate change propagation by using domain knowledge of developers. VariantSync detects and logs changes during development, tags these changes to feature expressions and automates the synchronization of changes between variants. As a side effect, using VariantSync for a while may increase the feature-to-code map-ping and, thus, ease a potential later migration to a product line. VariantSync is an open-source Eclipse plug-in distributed under L-GPL.

System Requirements

• JDK 1.8 or higher
• Eclipse IDE with the following plug-ins:
  • Plug-in Development Environment (PDE - minimum version is Luna)
  • Feature IDE (version 3.4.0 required)
    • Eclipse Update-Site for version v3.x: http://featureide.cs.ovgu.de/update/v3/
    • see FeatureIDE Homepage for more information about FeatureIDE

Installation

Manually:

• Import the four nested projects of VariantSync as existing projects into your eclipse workspace.
• Run de.tubs.variantsync.core/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF as eclipse application.

First Steps

1. Create a FeatureIDE-Project with the VariantSync composer
2. Create a feature model for your variants (this feature model describes the domain for the variants)
3. Create a feature configuration in your FeatureIDE project for each variant - the configuration file needs to have the same name as the variant
4. Import your variants (if they are not already in the workspace)
5. Right-Click on each project that is a variant and choose "Configure > Add As Variant" in the context menu. Alternatively, you can create projects for each variant by clicking "VariantSync > Create Variant Project" in the configuration context menu
6. Now, VariantSync is ready to support variant development

Hints

• Do not use eclipse code formatting function (CTRL + SHIFT + F) when using line diffs as patch technique.