Recovering software product line architecture of a family of object-oriented product variants

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) aims at applying a pre-planned systematic reuse of large-grained software artifacts to increase the software productivity and reduce the development cost. The idea of SPLE is to analyze the business domain of a family of products to identify the common and the variable parts between the products. However, it is common for companies to develop, in an ad-hoc manner (e.g. clone and own), a set of products that share common services and differ in terms of others. Thus, many recent research contributions are proposed to re-engineer existing product variants to a software product line. These contributions are mostly focused on managing the variability at the requirement level. Very few contributions address the variability at the architectural level despite its major importance. Starting from this observation, we propose an approach to reverse engineer the architecture of a set of product variants. Our goal is to identify the variability and dependencies among architectural-element variants. Our work relies on formal concept analysis to analyze the variability. To validate the proposed approach, we evaluated on two families of open-source product variants; Mobile Media and Health Watcher. The results of precision and recall metrics of the recovered architectural variability and dependencies are 81%, 91%, 67% and 100%, respectively.