A Software Product Line (SPL) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse
of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and
reduce the development cost. The idea of SPL is to analyze the business domain
of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between
the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc
manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common
functionalities and differ in terms of others. Thus, many recent research
contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a SPL.
Nevertheless, these contributions are mostly focused on managing the
variability at the requirement level. Very few contributions address the
variability at the architectural level despite its major importance. Starting
from this observation, we propose, in this paper, an approach to reverse
engineer the architecture of a set of product variants. Our goal is to identify
the variability and dependencies among architectural-element variants at the
architectural level. Our work relies on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to
analyze the variability. To validate the proposed approach, we experimented on
two families of open-source product variants; Mobile Media and Health Watcher.
The results show that our approach is able to identify the architectural
variability and the dependencies
