A case study in refactoring a legacy component for reuse in a product line

Abstract

This paper describes activities performed to systematically improve the design and implementation of an existing software component in order to reuse it in a software product line. The activities are embedded in the application of Fraunhofer's PuLSE-DSSA approach for defining the architecture of a new product line. The component under investigation is the so called Image Memory Handler (IMH) which is used in Ricoh's current products of office appliances such as copier machines, printers, and multi-functional peripherals. It is responsible for controlling memory usage and compressing and decompressing image data. Both the improvement of the component's design and implementation are based on a systematic analysis and focused on increasing maintainability and reusability and hence suitability for use in a product line

Supporting the Grow-and-Prune Model in Software Product Lines Evolution Using Clone Detection

“…Using clone detection to manage and create product lines is mentioned in several papers, such as [4]. In [16], text-based clone detection is used to detect similarities in variants that are supposed to be merged into an SPL. However, the false-positive rate was too high so that a minimum clone length of 25 lines is used.…”

Software architecture evolution through evolvability analysis

“…From evolvability perspective, Kolb et al [103] state that, having predetermined variation points as introduced in product line engineering makes it relatively easy to introduce changes during software evolution. This is because variation points help to keep the impact of changes small by enforcing separation of concerns among variants.…”

Seven habits of a highly effective smell detector

“…In his influential book, Fowler advocates frequent refactoring because it helps programmers understand code, find bugs, and add new features [4]. These recommendations do indeed seem to produce benefits in practice; several studies have shown quantitative improvements to code bases as a result of refactoring [7,5,9] and others have confirmed that it is a frequent practice [17,18]. To automate the process of transforming code, refactoring tools have been introduced for several environments, including IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/), Omnicore X-Develop (http://www.omnicore.com/en/xdevelop.…”