Software Product Line Engineering via Software Transplantation

Software Product Lines (SPLs) improve time-to-market, enhance software quality, and reduce maintenance costs. Current SPL reengineering practices are largely manual and require domain knowledge. Thus, adopting and, to a lesser extent, maintaining SPLs are expensive tasks, preventing many companies from enjoying their benefits. To address these challenges, we introduce Foundry, an approach utilizing software transplantation to reduce the manual effort of SPL adoption and maintenance. Foundry enables integrating features across different codebases, even codebases that are unaware that they are contributing features to a software product line. Each product produced by Foundry is pure code, without variability annotation, unlike feature flags, which eases variability management and reduces code bloat. We realise Foundry in prodScalpel, a tool that transplants multiple organs (i.e., a set of interesting features) from donor systems into an emergent product line for codebases written in C. Given tests and lightweight annotations identifying features and implantation points, prodScalpel automates feature extraction and integration. To evaluate its effectiveness, our evaluation compares feature transplantation using prodScalpel to the current state of practice: on our dataset, prodScalpel’s use speeds up feature migration by an average of 4.8 times when compared to current practice

NEOTROPICAL ALIEN MAMMALS: a data set of occurrence and abundance of alien mammals in the Neotropics

Biological invasion is one of the main threats to native biodiversity. For a species to become invasive, it must be voluntarily or involuntarily introduced by humans into a nonnative habitat. Mammals were among first taxa to be introduced worldwide for game, meat, and labor, yet the number of species introduced in the Neotropics remains unknown. In this data set, we make available occurrence and abundance data on mammal species that (1) transposed a geographical barrier and (2) were voluntarily or involuntarily introduced by humans into the Neotropics. Our data set is composed of 73,738 historical and current georeferenced records on alien mammal species of which around 96% correspond to occurrence data on 77 species belonging to eight orders and 26 families. Data cover 26 continental countries in the Neotropics, ranging from Mexico and its frontier regions (southern Florida and coastal-central Florida in the southeast United States) to Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay, and the 13 countries of Caribbean islands. Our data set also includes neotropical species (e.g., Callithrix sp., Myocastor coypus, Nasua nasua) considered alien in particular areas of Neotropics. The most numerous species in terms of records are from Bos sp. (n = 37,782), Sus scrofa (n = 6,730), and Canis familiaris (n = 10,084); 17 species were represented by only one record (e.g., Syncerus caffer, Cervus timorensis, Cervus unicolor, Canis latrans). Primates have the highest number of species in the data set (n = 20 species), partly because of uncertainties regarding taxonomic identification of the genera Callithrix, which includes the species Callithrix aurita, Callithrix flaviceps, Callithrix geoffroyi, Callithrix jacchus, Callithrix kuhlii, Callithrix penicillata, and their hybrids. This unique data set will be a valuable source of information on invasion risk assessments, biodiversity redistribution and conservation-related research. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this data paper when using the data in publications. We also request that researchers and teachers inform us on how they are using the data