Recovering commit dependencies for selective code integration in software product lines

In software product lines, multiple products of a software product family, share source code of common components. New features added to the common components of a software product family, are integrated into products following a selective code integration process. Selective code integration is a process in which developers pick the commits (i.e., code changes) related to a feature from one code branch and integrate them into another code branch. Developers often manually link the commits to the features to enable the selective integration of features. In current practice, not all dependent commits are always linked to features and developers might miss the unlinked commits during selective code integration. In this paper, we propose two grouping approaches that identify dependencies among commits and create groups of dependent commits that need to be integrated as a whole into a code branch. Our first approach is automatic and the other is developer-guided. Through a case study on data derived from a product line of mobile software applications, we show that our approaches can help to reduce by up to 94% integration failures caused by missing commit dependencies.