A product line is an approach for systematically managing configuration options of customizable systems, usually by means of features. Products are generated for configurations consisting of selected features. Product-line evolution can lead to unintended changes to product behavior. We illustrate that updating configurations after product-line evolution requires decisions of both, domain engineers responsible for product-line evolution as well as application engineers responsible for configurations. The challenge is that domain and application engineers might not be able to interact with each other. We propose a formal foundation and a methodology that enables domain engineers to guide application engineers through configuration evolution by sharing knowledge on product-line evolution and by defining automatic update operations for configurations. As an effect, we enable knowledge transfer between those engineers without the need for interactions. We evaluate our methodology on four large-scale industrial product lines. The results of the qualitative evaluation indicate that our method is flexible enough for real-world product-line evolution. The quantitative evaluation indicates that we detect product behavior changes for up to \(55.3\%\) of the configurations which would not have been detected using existing methods.

产品线是一种系统地管理可定制系统的配置选项的方法，通常是通过功能。产品是为包含选定功能的配置生成的。产品线的演变可能会导致产品行为的意外变化。我们说明在产品线进化后更新配置需要负责产品线进化的领域工程师和负责配置的应用工程师两者的决策。挑战在于领域工程师和应用工程师可能无法相互交互。我们提出了一个正式的基础和方法，使域工程师能够通过共享产品线演变的知识和定义配置的自动更新操作来指导应用程序工程师完成配置演变。因此，我们无需交互即可实现这些工程师之间的知识转移。我们在四个大型工业产品线上评估我们的方法。定性评估的结果表明，我们的方法对于现实世界的产品线演化来说足够灵活。定量评估表明，我们检测到产品行为变化长达\(55.3\%\)使用现有方法无法检测到的配置。