Verification of migrated product lines

Abstract

Maintaining several code bases (e.g., clones) of software variants in an application domain remains a widespread development practice, though costly and error-prone. Despite the many benefits that come with using the product-line approach, many companies are hesitant to migrate to an integrated platform for their product variants because such a migration is considered challenging and risky. Often this perception is because the migration is seen as a drastic change that is not easy to verify and assure developers that the migrated products still operate as before. In this research we propose to develop a language structure (or abstract representation) of artifacts in a software asset base that would facilitate an incremental migration of several code bases to an integrated platform. We further seek to propose and evaluate techniques for verifying the migrated product line with respect to its original code bases.