Extraction of a Software Product Line Using Conditional Compilation - An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Software Product Lines (LPS) is a development approach whose aims is to create a family of software. Despite the increasing interest in software product lines, researches in this area are still very scarce. This hampers broader conclusions about the effective application of principles-based LPS in real systems development. Thus this work describes an experiment involving the extraction of a product line for the TBC-GAAL, educational software developed in Java programming language for teaching Analytic Geometry and Linear Algebra. Using conditional compilation, ten TBC-GAAL features were implemented. The features considered in the experiment were characterized using a set of specific measures for software product lines. Considering the results of this characterization, we highlighted the key challenges involved in extracting features from real software.