Product Line Metrics for Legacy Software in Practice
This work addresses the company-specific challenge of integrating legacy software into product lines for automotive manufacturers, representing an incremental contribution.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating legacy software's potential for creating a software product line, applying a method to steering system projects at Volkswagen AG and reporting on its practical implementation.
Nowadays, customer products like vehicles do not only contain mechanical parts but also a highly complex software and their manufacturers have to offer many variants of technically very similar systems with sometimes only small differences in their behavior. The proper reuse of software artifacts which realize this behavior using a software product line is discussed in recent literature and appropriate methods and techniques for their management are proposed. However, establishing a software product line for integrating already existing legacy software to reuse valuable resources for future similar products is very company-specific. In this paper, a method is outlined for evaluating objectively a legacy software's potential to create a software product line. This method is applied to several development projects at Volkswagen AG Business Unit Braunschweig to evaluate the software product line potential for steering systems.