Towards the integration of model-driven engineering, software product line engineering, and software configuration management

Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE), Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) and Software Configuration Management (SCM) have been established as independent disciplines to ease different aspects of software development. The usage of models as high-level abstractions promises to increase productivity, while software product lines manage variability within a family of similar software products; software configuration management systems manage evolution and support collaborative development. In this paper, we explore the state of the art regarding the pairwise combinations MDSE/SPLE, SPLE/SCM, and MDSE/SCM and show that an integrated solution combining all three disciplines is missing. We present a conceptual framework to integrate MDSE, SPLE and SCM uniformly based on a filtered editing model. The framework implies a number of advantages, namely unconstrained variability, a reduction of cognitive complexity, improved consistency, tool independence, and a higher level of automation. Our formalism is based on a uniform versioning model for temporal, cooperative, and logical versioning of models. By an example, we show the feasibility of our approach.