Extractive Multi Product-Line Engineering
This addresses maintenance challenges for software engineers managing cloned variants, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing product-line extraction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of unsustainable software maintenance caused by cloning in variant development by proposing an extractive multi product-line engineering approach, which re-engineers clones into reusable components and synthesizes a multi-layer feature model to re-establish sustainable development.
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.