Towards a co-evolution model for software product lines based on cladistics

Abstract

The evolution of a software product line is more challenging than the evolution of a single product, because its artifacts depend on many products. If a change is not well studied, it can break the integrity of the reference architecture of the software product line and all the derived products. Hence, when dealing with evolution, the understanding of change and its impact must be the most important activity. Biology is the science which studied evolution the most. Therefore it was necessary for us to understand evolution in biology in order to handle evolution in software product lines. This paper presents our approach to deal with change understanding in software product line using co-evolution analysis which was used in biology to understand how organisms influence each other during their evolution over time. Similarly to biological co-evolution, the co-evolution of artifacts of a software product line consists on analyzing how the evolution of an artifact influences the evolution of the others. The input data used in our approach are extracted from the history of changes that happened to each version of the software product. Our objective is to establish a co-evolution model for software product lines using Cladistics classification which illustrates the evolution of a population through an evolutionary tree.