Software Product Line Engineering via Software Transplantation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Foundry, an automated tool that leverages software transplantation to rapidly create and maintain software product lines, significantly reducing manual effort and time in feature migration.

Contribution

Foundry is a novel automated approach that streamlines feature extraction and migration for software product lines, outperforming manual efforts in speed and efficiency.

Findings

Foundry transplants features 4.8 times faster than manual efforts.

Successfully created two product lines from three real-world systems.

Automated feature migration reduces development time significantly.

Abstract

For companies producing related products, a Software Product Line (SPL) is a software reuse method that improves time-to-market and software quality, achieving substantial cost reductions.These benefits do not come for free. It often takes years to re-architect and re-engineer a codebase to support SPL and, once adopted, it must be maintained. Current SPL practice relies on a collection of tools, tailored for different reengineering phases, whose output developers must coordinate and integrate. We present Foundry, a general automated approach for leveraging software transplantation to speed conversion to and maintenance of SPL. Foundry facilitates feature extraction and migration. It can efficiently, repeatedly, transplant a sequence of features, implemented in multiple files. We used Foundry to create two valid product lines that integrate features from three real-world systems in an automated way. Moreover, we conducted an experiment comparing Foundry's feature migration with manual effort. We show that Foundry automatically migrated features across codebases 4.8 times faster, on average, than the average time a group of SPL experts took to accomplish the task.