A Strategy to Lead with Multiple Dependencies in a Coding Branch Structure: A Case Study with Mobile Device Production

The productions of smartphones increased in recent years, and software manufacturers need to increase their production management capacity in code versioning in the same proportion. The models explored in the literature use product derivation methods with the highest occurrence of using a software line model, combining it with only one technique called clone-and-own. This article presents the uTrack, a strategy to lead with multiple dependencies in a coding branch structure: a case study with mobile device production. The uTrack check if a set of CLs from the base Product Branch is already propagated to the derived Product branch. We compare our solution with a previous manual method. Comparing the performance time of both approaches, it appears that 90% of the participants were faster when using uTrack. Regarding usability, 70% of the participants considered the UTrack very easy, while the manual method was considered very easy by only 20% of the participants. uTrack is a promising tool for tracking CLs at different branch levels in software mobile products lines.