An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

Dubinsky, Yael; Rubin, Julia; Berger, Thorsten; Duszynski, Slawomir; Becker, Martin; Czarnecki, Krzysztof

doi:10.1109/csmr.2013.13

Cited by 226 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Advantages. Cloning is associated with many benefits [2,8]. It is easy and fast for teams knowledgeable about the project, since no special development tools or processes are needed.…”

Section: L0: Ad-hoc Clone-and-ownmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Flexible product line engineering with a virtual platform

Antkiewicz

Wenbin

Berger

et al. 2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Cloning is widely used for creating new product variants. While it has low adoption costs, it often leads to maintenance problems. Long term reliance on cloning is discouraged in favor of systematic reuse offered by product line engineering (PLE) with a central platform integrating all reusable assets. Unfortunately, adopting an integrated platform requires a risky and costly migration. However, industrial experience shows that some benefits of an integrated platform can be achieved by properly managing a set of cloned variants.In this paper, we propose an incremental and minimally invasive PLE adoption strategy called virtual platform. Virtual platform covers a spectrum of strategies between ad-hoc clone and own and PLE with a fully-integrated platform divided into six governance levels. Transitioning to a governance level requires some effort and it provides some incremental benefits. We discuss tradeoffs among the levels and illustrate the strategy on an example implementation.

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“…Advantages. Cloning is associated with many benefits [2,8]. It is easy and fast for teams knowledgeable about the project, since no special development tools or processes are needed.…”

Section: L0: Ad-hoc Clone-and-ownmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Existing incremental PLE adoption strategies [4,6] discourage relying on cloning due to maintainability issues. However, as shown by industrial practice, eliminating cloning and adopting the integrated platform is not always desirable nor beneficial as it requires high-risk migration processes [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible product line engineering with a virtual platform

Antkiewicz

Wenbin

Berger

et al. 2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…One such case is the copy-paste-modify which is performed when creating product variants for supporting different customer needs [9]. This practice may increase the productivity in a short term period but in the long run it becomes problematic due to the complex maintenance and further evolution activities of the variants [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature Location Benchmark for Software Families Using Eclipse Community Releases

Martínez¹,

Ziadi²,

Papadakis³

et al. 2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. It is common belief that high impact research in software reuse requires assessment in realistic, non-trivial, comparable, and reproducible settings. However, real software artefacts and common representations are usually unavailable. Also, establishing a representative ground truth is a challenging and debatable subject. Feature location in the context of software families is a research field that is becoming more mature with a high proliferation of techniques. We present EFLBench, a benchmark and a framework to provide a common ground for this field. EFLBench leverages the efforts made by the Eclipse Community which provides real feature-based family artefacts and their implementations. Eclipse is an active and non-trivial project and thus, it establishes an unbiased ground truth. EFLBench is publicly available and supports all tasks for feature location techniques integration, benchmark construction and benchmark usage. We demonstrate its usage and its simplicity and reproducibility by comparing four techniques.

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“…It is particularly true for big clones such as duplicated files or directories. Big clones happen even if software evolution is systematically managed with variability management techniques [10]. In the paper, we use the Linux kernel to illustrate why this happens, and how we can manage big clones.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing Big Clones to Ease Evolution: Linux Kernel Example

Kumar

Jarzabek

Dan³

2016

Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems

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Abstract-Successful software is often enhanced and adapted to the needs of new users. During evolution, a software system grows in size, becomes more complex, and costly to maintain. In this paper, we point to big clones-large granular duplicated program structures such as files or directories-as one of many reasons why this happens. Using the Linux kernel as an example, we show that big clones arise in the Linux kernel despite careful architecture design and a systematic approach for managing variability. We propose a solution to avoid these big clones by representing them as generalized templates in ART (Adaptive Reuse Technique). ART templates are constructed on top of the Linux code, without conflicts with the state-of-art techniques and tools used to manage the Linux kernel. Benefits include simplification of the Linux kernel due to non-redundancy, easier comprehension, and traceability of the change impact during evolution. The proposed technique is general and the Linux example discussed in this paper also illustrates general phenomena.

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An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

Cited by 226 publications

References 34 publications

Flexible product line engineering with a virtual platform

Flexible product line engineering with a virtual platform

Feature Location Benchmark for Software Families Using Eclipse Community Releases

Managing Big Clones to Ease Evolution: Linux Kernel Example

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