Mining features from the object-oriented source code of software variants by combining lexical and structural similarity

Abstract

Migrating software product variants which are deemed similar into a product line is a challenging task with main impact in software reengineering. To exploit existing software variants to build a software product line (SPL), the first step is to mine the feature model of this SPL which involves extracting common and optional features. Thus, we propose, in this paper, a new approach to mine features from the object-oriented source code of software variants by using lexical and structural similarity. To validate our approach, we applied it on ArgoUML, Health Watcher and Mobile Media software. The results of this evaluation showed that most of the features were identified1.