Traditional approaches to managing configurations for multiple variants include branching and hand-crafted configuration code. However, such approaches often lead to problems such as:

• failure to merge branched code
• increased maintenance effort
• difficulty in creating an error-free configuration
• problems building variants when the configuration expert is unavailable
• a lack of understanding as to why a variant has been configured in a particular way

pure::variants offers a solution to these problems.

Using pure::variants powerful configuration language you describe the rules for building your variants. These rules can then be used to specify individual variants and to automatically extract the right configuration elements directly from your CM tools or from your file-system to be fed into your build process or other downstream development processes.

pure::variants also simplifies the configuration process by automatically resolving any problems that arise where possible or highlighting them to you otherwise.

Furthermore, since you have now explicitly captured what is common and what differs between variants, it becomes possible to perform variant management in other parts of the software life cycle such as Requirements Management, Quality Assurance, Defect Tracking, Documentation etc.

Read how pure::variants works with Subversion, CVS, other Version Control Systems and with file-based source code.

Download pure::variants now to see how this works in practice.