Towards an Automated Product Line Architecture Recovery: The Apo-Games Case Study

Abstract

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has been widely adopted for applying systematic reuse in families of systems. Given the high upfront investment required for SPLE adoption, organizations commonly start with more opportunistic reuse approaches (e.g., a single system that they clone and modify). However, maintenance problems appear when managing a large number of similar systems where each of them implements and evolves particular characteristics. One viable solution to solve this issue is to migrate to SPLs using an extractive approach. This initiative, in its early phases, includes the definition of a Product Line Architecture (PLA) supporting the variants derivation and also allowing the customization according to customers' needs. Our objective is to provide automatic support in PLA recovery to reduce the time and effort in this process. One of the main issues in the extractive approach is the explosion of the variability in the PLA representation. Our approach is based on identifying the minimum subset of cross-product architectural information for an effective PLA recovery. To evaluate our approach, we applied it in the case of the Apo-Games projects. The experimentation in this real family of systems showed that our automatic approach is able to identify variant outliers and help domain experts to take informed decisions to support PLA recovery.