SHF Small: Language Support for Variation Maintenance

管理变异是软件工程的重要组成部分。许多现有的软件项目已经可以生成大量不同的程序，这些程序在不同的平台上运行，并提供不同的功能集。对软件产品线和面向功能的软件开发的研究为大规模可配置软件的开发提供了过程和工具，这表明软件系统的可变性只会继续增长。目前很大程度上未解决的问题是如何系统地转换变化表示以支持变化的创建、重构和迁移，以及对富含变化的软件存储库的分析和查询。本研究的目的是探讨变异结构的系统转换，并开发语言支持。首先，收集变异编程任务将为理解变异转换的性质和程度提供基础，并且汇编此类任务的目录将有助于变异语言的设计、评估和比较。其次，定义的语法和语义的转换选择演算，扩展（代表性）选择演算的计算功能，将支持调查的形式属性的变化规划。第三，变异类型系统的发展有助于描述变异结构的不同变化和演化。此外，变化模块系统的开发将提供选择演算表示的复杂范围和绑定问题所需的低级细节与更高级的声明性变化视图之间的接口。最后，设计一个特定领域的嵌入式语言的变化编程将允许在软件工件中的变化结构的变换的简单描述。它还支持使用变化转换的实验。由于这项研究的范围超出了专业软件，也涵盖了最终用户的编程系统，如电子表格，开发的方法将适用于各种各样的情况下，从而可以使数百万用户以更系统的方式处理变化。

Managing variation is an important part of software engineering. Many existing software projects can already generate a huge number of distinct programs that run on different platforms and provide different feature sets. Research on software product lines and feature-oriented software development has provided processes and tools for the development of massively configurable software, suggesting that the variability of software systems will only continue to grow. A currently largely unsolved problem is how to systematically transform variation representations to support the creation, refactoring, and migration of variation, as wall as the analysis and querying of variation-rich software repositories. The objective of this research is to investigate the systematic transformation of variation structures and develop language support for it. The following technical approach is pursued. First, gathering variation programming tasks will provide a basis for the understanding of the nature and extent of variation transformations, and assembling a catalog of such tasks will aid the design, evaluation, and comparison of variation languages. Second, the definition of the syntax and semantics of a transformational choice calculus, which extends the (representational) choice calculus with computational features, will support the investigation of formal properties of variation programming. Third, the development of a variation type system facilitates the characterization of different kinds of changes and evolutions of variational structures. Moreover, the development of a variation module system will provide an interface between low-level details required by the intricate scoping and binding issues of the choice calculus representation and a more high-level, declarative view of variations. Finally, the design of a domain-specific embedded language for variation programming will allow the easy description of transformations of variation structures in software artifacts. It also supports the experimentation with variation transformations. Since the scope of this research extends beyond professional software and covers also end-user programming systems, such as spreadsheets, the developed methods will be applicable in a wide variety of contexts and can thus empower millions of users to handle variation in a more systematic way.