Extractive Multi Product-Line Engineering

TL;DR

This paper presents an approach for extracting multi-product lines from cloned software variants to improve sustainability by re-engineering clones into reusable components and synthesizing feature models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for extractive multi product-line engineering that handles intra- and inter-system clones for sustainable software development.

Findings

Re-engineering clones into reusable components reduces maintenance effort.

Synthesizing multi-layer feature models aids in managing variability.

The approach supports sustainable evolution of software variants.

Abstract

Cloning is a general approach to create new functionality within variants as well as new system variants. It is a fast, flexible, intuitive, and economical approach to evolve systems in the short run. However, in the long run, the maintenance effort increases. A common solution to this problem is the extraction of a product line from a set of cloned variants. This process requires a detailed analysis of variants to extract variability information. However, clones within a variant are usually not considered in the process, but are also a cause for unsustainable software. This thesis proposes an extractive multi product-line engineering approach to re-establish the sustainable development of software variants. We propose an approach to re-engineer intra-system and inter-system clones into reusable, configurable components stored in an integrated platform and synthesize a matching multi-layer feature model.