Tool Support for Product-Line Maintenance

Software product lines are typically instances of long-living software. One reason is that a product line must be maintained if any of its products needs maintenance. Another reason is that the goal of product lines is to foresee future evolution and plan for it in advance. Hence, product lines are typically maintained for years, and this maintenance is more challenging than that of single systems. First, product lines are typically developed by larger development teams. Second, there are more artifacts to be maintained than for a single product of the product line. Consequently, code quality and code documentation are crucial for product line maintenance. Tasks required to maintain product lines have already been touched in previous parts of the book. In this chapter, we focus on techniques that help developers to understand the product line code more easily. For brevity, we focus on feature-oriented programming only.