Software Product Line Engineering Basics - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 53

changes affect the various types of assets in a software product
line and how anticipation and direction can save the product
line consistency. Conceptual and automated techniques that
support these practices are also presented. One obvious link is
generally between management of evolution and traceability;
both have a common objective of facilitating changes. However,
both are very often disconnected and insufficient to manage a
product line properly.
In [MOH 08] the authors argue for a strong synergy
between software configuration management and traceability
repositories. Software configuration management, such as
Subversion, or Microsoft Visual SourceSafe are able to store
software artifacts and to memorize their evolution. The
primary aspect of traceability that is enabled by configuration
management systems is the traceability of the evolution of
versioned items. As configuration management typically has
its own repository and rules to store artifact versions, the
difficulty is to facilitate a consistent trace and configuration
repository without loss of efficiency, loss of information, or
difficult querying.
As far as we know, two attempts have been made to connect
configuration management and traceability. An advanced
solution is proposed in [MIT 08] with the concept of feature-
drivenversioning.Thisisasolutionabletoversionproductline
artifacts on a per feature basis; thus, it is really adequate for a
product line. However, the current configuration management
is file based and, thus, it requires a new configuration system.
The second approach is described in [ANQ 09, RAS 11]. The
solution adopted is to import references of the versioning
items of the configuration management repository (SVN in this
case) as traceable artifacts. Versioning in the configuration
management repository leads to traces in the traceability
repository between the considered artifacts. This provides a
uniform way to manage and query trace information. One
interesting point of this solution is that, once the versioning