REVE 2021: 9th International Workshop on Reverse Variability Engineering

Software Product Line (SPL) migration remains a challenging endeavour. From organizational issues to purely technical challenges, there is a wide range of barriers that complicates SPL adoption. This workshop aims to foster research about making the most of the two main inputs for SPL migration: 1) domain knowledge and 2) legacy assets. Domain knowledge, usually implicit and spread across an organization, is key to define the SPL scope and to validate the variability model and its semantics. At the technical level, domain expertise is also needed to create or extract the reusable software components. Legacy assets can be, for instance, similar product variants (e.g., requirements, models, source code, etc.) that were implemented using ad-hoc reuse techniques such as clone-and-own. More generally, the workshop REverse Variability Engineering attracts researchers and practitioners contributing to processes, techniques, tools, or empirical studies related to the automatic, semi-automatic or manual extraction or refinement of SPL assets

Open-source software product line extraction processes: the ArgoUML-SPL and Phaser cases

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are rarely developed from scratch. Commonly, they emerge from one product when there is a need to create tailored variants, or from existing variants created in an ad-hoc way once their separated maintenance and evolution become challenging. Despite the vast literature about re-engineering systems into SPLs and related technical approaches, there is a lack of detailed analysis of the process itself and the effort involved. In this paper, we provide and analyze empirical data of the extraction processes of two open source case studies, namely ArgoUML and Phaser. Both cases emerged from the transition of a monolithic system into an SPL. The analysis relies on information mined from the version control history of their respective source-code repositories and the discussion with developers that took part in the process. Unlike previous works that focused mostly on the structural results of the final SPL, the contribution of this study is an in-depth characterization of the processes. With this work, we aimed at providing a deeper understanding of the strategies for SPL extraction and their implications. Our results indicate that the source code changes can range from almost a fourth to over half of the total lines of code. Developers may or may not use branching strategies for feature extraction. Additionally, the problems faced during the extraction process may be due to lack of tool support, complexity on managing feature dependencies and issues with feature constraints. We made publicly available the datasets and the analysis scripts of both case studies to be used as a baseline for extractive SPL adoption research and practice.This research was partially funded by CNPq, grant no. 408356/2018-9; FAPPR, grant no. 51435; and FAPERJ PDR-10 Fellowship 202073/2020. Open access funding provided by Johannes Kepler University Lin

Spectrum-based feature localization: A case study using ArgoUML

Feature localization (FL) is a basic activity in re-engineering legacy systems into software product lines. In this work, we explore the use of the Spectrum-based localization technique for this task. This technique is traditionally used for fault localization but with practical applications in other tasks like the dynamic FL approach that we propose. The ArgoUML SPL benchmark is used as a case study and we compare it with a previous hybrid (static and dynamic) approach from which we reuse the manual and testing execution traces of the features. We conclude that it is feasible and sound to use the Spectrum-based approach providing promising results in the benchmark metrics

ESPLA: A catalog of Extractive SPL Adoption case studies

International audienceBuilding Software Product Lines (SPLs) from existing artefacts is known as the extractive approach for SPL adoption. The traditional case is that variants are created with ad-hoc reuse (e.g., copy-paste-modify to quickly respond to different customer needs) and practitioners want to reengineer them to an SPL. Several industrial cases have been presented in the literature to motivate the interest of the extraction and many case studies are used to validate methods and techniques for different activities during this adoption process.However, there is no catalog or repository that gather together case studies and artefacts related to extractive SPL adoption. In this paper we present ESPLA, a catalog of Extractive SPL Adoption case studies that aims to foster the advance of this field by providing comprehensive information about case studies that will be otherwise scattered in the literature. Researchers, practitioners and educators can use this catalog to find the case studies that better fit to their particular needs. Currently, ESPLA contains information about 123 case studies and it is intended to be a catalog that can be updated and extended by the community