Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a theoretical framework which structures a set of objects described by properties. In order to migrate software product variants which are considered similar into a product line, it is essential to identify the common and the optional features between the software product variants. In this paper, we present an approach for feature location in a collection of software product variants based on FCA. In order to validate our approach we applied it on a case study based on ArgoUML. The results of this evaluation showed that all of the features were identified.

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 identified 1 .