Publications

2026

[ICSE 2026]
Decades of GNU Patch and Git Cherry-Pick: Can We Do Better?
Alexander Schultheiß, Alexander Boll, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Sandra Greiner, Thomas Thüm, Timo Kehrer. To Appear In: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2026.
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2025

[PhD Dissertation]
Towards Managed Clone-and-Own: Automating Matching and Patching
Alexander Schultheiß. In: BORIS Thesis, University of Bern, 2025.
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[FSE Companion 2025]
Beyond Software Families: Community-Driven Variability
Roman Bögli, Alexander Boll, Alexander Schultheiß, Timo Kehrer. In: Companion Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2025.
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2024

[OOPSLA 2024]
On the Expressive Power of Languages for Static Variability
Paul Maximilian Bittner, Alexander Schultheiß, Benjamin Moosherr, Jeffrey M. Young, Leopoldo Teixeira, Eric Walkingshaw, Parisa Ataei, Thomas Thüm. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL (OOPSLA). ACM, New York, NY, USA, October 2024.
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[SPLC 2024]
[Best Research Paper Award]
Give an Inch and Take a Mile? Effects of Adding Reliable Knowledge to Heuristic Feature Tracing
Sandra Greiner, Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Thomas Thüm, Timo Kehrer. In: Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Lines Conference (SPLC). ACM, New York, NY, USA, September 2024.
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[FSE Companion 2024]
[Best Paper Award]
Variability-Aware Differencing with DiffDetective
Paul Maximilian Bittner, Alexander Schultheiß, Benjamin Moosherr, Timo Kehrer, and Thomas Thüm. In: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), Demonstrations. ACM, New York, NY, USA, July 2024.
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[EASE 2024]
[Distinguished Paper Award]
Towards Semi-Automated Merge Conflict Resolution: Is It Easier Than We Expected?
Alexander Boll, Yael van Dok, Manuel Ohrndorf, Alexander Schultheiß, Timo Kehrer. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE). ACM, New York, NY, USA, June 2024.
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[JSS]
Beyond code: Is there a difference between comments in visual and textual languages?
Alexander Boll, Pooja Rani, Alexander Schultheiß, Timo Kehrer. In: Journal in Systems an Software (JSS). Elsevier, May 2024, Volume 215.
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2023

[SoSyM 2023]
RaQuN: A Generic and Scalable N-Way Model Matching Algorithm
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Alexander Boll, Lars Grunske, Thomas Thüm, and Timo Kehrer. In: Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). Springer, October 2023, pp. 1495-1517.
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[SPLC 2023]
Views on Edits to Variational Software
Paul Maximilian Bittner, Alexander Schultheiß, Sandra Greiner, Benjamin Moosherr, Sebastian Krieter, Christof Tinnes, Timo Kehrer, and Thomas Thüm. In: Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference (SPLC ‘23). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 141-152.
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[VaMoS 2023]
Benchmark Generation with VEVOS: A Coverage Analysis of Evolution Scenarios in Variant-Rich Systems
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Sandra Greiner, and Timo Kehrer. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMoS ‘23). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13–22.
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2022

[ESEC/FSE 2022]
Classifying Edits to Variability in Source Code
Paul Maximilian Bittner, Christof Tinnes, Alexander Schultheiß, Sören Viegener, Timo Kehrer, and Thomas Thüm. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 196–208.
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[ICSME 2022]
Quantifying the Potential to Automate the Synchronization of Variants in Clone-and-Own
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Thomas Thüm, and Timo Kehrer. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME ‘22).
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[EASE 2022]
Simulating the Evolution of Clone-and-Own Projects with VEVOS
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Sascha El-Sharkawy, Thomas Thüm, and Timo Kehrer. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2022 (EASE ‘22). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 231–236.
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2021

[MODELS 2021]
Scalable N-Way Model Matching Using Multi-Dimensional Search Trees
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Lars Grunske, Thomas Thüm, and Timo Kehrer. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS ‘21), 2021, pp. 1-12.
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[ESEC/FSE 2021]
Feature Trace Recording
Paul Maximilian Bittner, Alexander Schultheiß, Thomas Thüm, Timo Kehrer, Jeffrey M. Young, and Lukas Linsbauer. In: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE ’21), August 23–28, 2021, Athens, Greece. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages.
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[ICSE-NIER 2021]
Bridging the Gap Between Clone-and-Own and Software Product Lines
Timo Kehrer, Thomas Thüm, Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner. In: Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER), 2021, pp. 21-25.
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2020

[SPLC 2020]
On the Use of Product-Line Variants as Experimental Subjects for Clone-and-Own Research: A Case Study
Alexander Schultheiß, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Timo Kehrer, and Thomas Thüm. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference (SPLC ’20), October 19–23, 2020, Montréal, QC, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages.
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[JOT 2020]
Comparison of Graph-based Model Transformation Rules
Alexander Schultheiß, Alexander Boll, and Timo Kehrer. In: Journal of Object Technology, Volume 19, no. 2, pp. 3:1-21.
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2017

[GCPR 2017]
Finding the Unknown: Novelty Detection with Extreme Value Signatures of Deep Neural Activations
Alexander Schultheiß, Christoph Käding, Alexander Freytag, and Joachim Denzler. In: Roth, V., Vetter, T. (eds) Pattern Recognition, Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10496. Springer, Cham, 2017.
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