Variability Mining: Consistent Semi-automatic Detection of Product-Line Features

Software product line engineering is an efficient means to generate a set of tailored software products from a common implementation. However, adopting a product-line approach poses a major challenge and significant risks, since typically legacy code must be migrated toward a product line. Our aim i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2014-01, Vol.40 (1), p.67-82
Main Authors: Kastner, Christian, Dreiling, Alexander, Ostermann, Klaus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Companies
Computer programs
Consistency
Context
Data mining
Developers
Educational institutions
feature
Feature extraction
feature location
Java
LEADT
Legacy
Mining
Product lines
Reverse engineering
Software
Software development
Software engineering
software product line
Systems development
Variability
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Summary:Software product line engineering is an efficient means to generate a set of tailored software products from a common implementation. However, adopting a product-line approach poses a major challenge and significant risks, since typically legacy code must be migrated toward a product line. Our aim is to lower the adoption barrier by providing semi-automatic tool support-called variability mining -to support developers in locating, documenting, and extracting implementations of product-line features from legacy code. Variability mining combines prior work on concern location, reverse engineering, and variability-aware type systems, but is tailored specifically for the use in product lines. Our work pursues three technical goals: (1) we provide a consistency indicator based on a variability-aware type system, (2) we mine features at a fine level of granularity, and (3) we exploit domain knowledge about the relationship between features when available. With a quantitative study, we demonstrate that variability mining can efficiently support developers in locating features.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2013.45