The e4CompareFramework: Annotation-based Software Product-Line Extraction

Software product-line engineering (SPLE) provides structured reuse strategies reducing the time-to-market and decreasing development and maintenance effort when developing variant-rich software systems. In practice, however, unstructured reuse strategies such as clone-and-own are frequently used. While copying, pasting, and modifying artifacts to create new variants seems straightforward, it increases the maintenance effort. SPLE requires the extraction of a software product-line (SPL) from existing variants. However, this task needs complex analyses that are not feasible manually, making tool support crucial. This paper presents a process for annotation-based extraction of an SPL from related variants with a detailed source code analysis starting from the expression level implemented as the e4CompareFramework (e4C). The e4CompareFramework provides a customizable detailed variability mining method, a generalization from our previous work. In addition, we implemented a feature location technique and an annotation-based feature model extraction technique to provide a complete SPL extraction process.