A Language for Software Variation Research

Martin Erwig, Oregon State University, USA

Managing variation is an important problem in software engineering that takes different forms, ranging from version control and configuration management to software product lines. In this talk, I present our recent work on the choice calculus, a fundamental representation for software variation that can serve as a common language of discourse for variation research, filling a role similar to lambda calculus in programming language research.

After motivating the design of the choice calculus and sketching its semantics, I will discuss several potential application areas.