FDDetector: A Tool for Deduplicating Features in Software Product Lines

Duplication is one of the model defects that affect software product lines during their evolution. Many approaches have been proposed to deal with duplication in code level while duplication in features hasn’t received big interest in literature. At the aim of reducing maintenance cost and improving product quality in an early stage of a product line, we have proposed in previous work a tool support based on a conceptual framework. The main objective of this tool called FDDetector is to detect and correct duplication in product line models. In this paper, we recall the motivation behind creating a solution for feature deduplication and we present progress done in the design and implementation of FDDetector

Model Defects in Evolving Software Product Lines: A Review of Literature

Software products lines (SPLs) are long living systems that undergo several evolutions throughout their lifetime due to many reasons related to technology, strategy, business, etc. These evolutions can be the source of several defects that impact the different artefacts of SPLs, namely requirements, models, architecture and code. Many studies in the literature have dealt with the correction of defects in software product lines, but to our knowledge, no reviews have been carried out to provide an extensive overview of these studies. In this paper, we present a literature review of model defects in software product lines. The purpose of this review is to enumerate the different defects discussed in literature and to present the approaches proposed to detect and correct them. The findings of this review reveal new research leads to explore in this issue

Analyzing Trends in Software Product Lines Evolution Using aCladistics Based Approach

A software product line is a complex system the aim of which is to provide a platform dedicated to large reuse. It necessitates a great investment. Thus, its ability to cope with customers’ ever-changing requirements is among its key success factors. Great effort has been made to deal with the software product line evolution. In our previous works, we carried out a classification of these works to provide an overview of the used techniques. We also identified the following key challenges of software product lines evolution: the ability to predict future changes, the ability to define the impact of a change easily and the improvement in understanding the change. We have already tackled the second and the third challenges. The objective of this paper is to deal with the first challenge. We use the cladistics classification which was used in biology to understand the evolution of organisms sharing the same ancestor and their process of descent at the aim of predicting their future changes. By analogy, we consider a population of applications for media management on mobile devices derived from the same platform and we use cladistics to construct their evolutionary tree. We conducted an analysis to show how to identify the evolution trends of the case study products and to predict future changes

Duplication Detection When Evolving Feature Models of Software Product Lines

After the derivation of specific applications from a software product line, the applications keep evolving with respect to new customer’s requirements. In general, evolutions in most industrial projects are expressed using natural language, because it is the easiest and the most flexible way for customers to express their needs. However, the use of this means of communication has shown its limits in detecting defects, such as inconsistency and duplication, when evolving the existing models of the software product line. The aim of this paper is to transform the natural language specifications of new evolutions into a more formal representation using natural language processing. Then, an algorithm is proposed to automatically detect duplication between these specifications and the existing product line feature models. In order to instantiate the proposed solution, a tool is developed to automatize the two operations