Facilitating Configurability by Separation of Concerns in the Source Code

Abstract

Producing configurations of a software product, e.g. designed for different operating systems, using different database technologies or serving different groups of users is undoubtedly a time-consuming and error-prone process. In this paper we propose an approach facilitating the configurability of software using separation of concerns, which helps to eliminate unwanted parts of the source code whenever the corresponding requirements change without manual intervention and without the risk of corrupting the program. A prototype implementation provided with the approach demonstrates its powerfulness in the practice.