Analyzing Variability in 25 Years of Industrial Legacy Software

Rosiak, Kamil; Urbaniak, Oliver; Schlie, Alexander; Seidl, Christoph; Schaefer, Ina

doi:10.1145/3307630.3342410

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…However, there are few extractive approaches focused on reverse engineering of legacy systems without feature information. In our prior work, we analyze Pascal programs to identify code clones [48]. We use a model-based approach for the comparison of Pascal variants that compares programs statement-wise.…”

Section: Inter Variant Clone Detection (Variability Analysis)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Custom-Tailored Clone Detection for IEC 61131-3 Programming Languages

Rosiak¹,

Schlie²,

Linsbauer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Automated production systems (aPS) are highly customized systems that consist of hardware and software. Such aPS are controlled by a programmable logic controller (PLC), often in accordance with the IEC 61131-3 standard that divides system implementation into so-called program organization units (POUs) as the smallest software unit and is comprised of multiple textual (Structured Text (ST)) and graphical (Function Block Diagram (FBD), Ladder Diagram (LD), and Sequential Function Chart(SFC)) programming languages that can be arbitrarily nested.A common practice during the development of such systems is reusing implementation artifacts by copying, pasting, and then modifying code. This approach is referred to as code cloning. It is used on a fine-granular level where a POU is cloned within a system variant. It is also applied on the coarse-granular system level, where the entire system is cloned and adapted to create a system variant, for example for another customer. This ad hoc practice for the development of variants is commonly referred to as clone-and-own. It allows the fast development of variants to meet varying customer requirements or altered regulatory guidelines. However, clone-and-own is a non-sustainable approach and does not scale with an increasing number of variants. It has a detrimental effect on the overall quality of a software system, such as the propagation of bugs to other variants, which harms maintenance.In order to support the effective development and maintenance of such systems, a detailed code clone analysis is required. On the one hand, an analysis of code clones within a variant (i.e., clone detection in the classical sense) supports experts in refactoring respective code into library components. On the other hand, an analysis of commonalities and differences between cloned variants (i.e., variability analysis) supports the maintenance and further reuse and facilitates the migration of variants into a software productline (SPL).In this paper, we present an approach for the automated detection of code clones within variants (intra variant clone detection) and between variants (inter variant clone detection) of IEC61131-3 control software with arbitrary nesting of both textual and graphical languages. We provide an implementation of the approach in the variability analysis toolkit (VAT) as a freely available prototype for the analysis of IEC 61131-3 programs. For the evaluation, we developed a meta-model-based mutation framework to measure our approach's precision and recall. Besides, we evaluated our approach using the Pick and Place Unit (PPU) and Extended Pick and Place Unit (xPPU) scenarios. Results show the usefulness of intra and inter clone detection in the domain of automated production systems.

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Section: Inter Variant Clone Detection (Variability Analysis)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Custom-Tailored Clone Detection for IEC 61131-3 Programming Languages

Rosiak¹,

Schlie²,

Linsbauer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Prior work on re-engineering variability in our group [55,76,[78][79][80][81] focuses on the solution space for MATLAB/Simulink models [64][65][66][67]. Prior work encompasses a coarse-grain variability analysis of an entire model portfolio [64], followed by a fine-grained analysis of individual systems [66,67] and, finally, the combination of both analyses to produce a holistic 150% model that represents solution-space variability for multiple MATLAB/Simulink models [65].…”

Section: Prior Work On Solution Space Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental feature model synthesis for clone-and-own software systems in MATLAB/Simulink

Schlie

Knüppel

Seidl

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Systems and Software Product Line: Volume a - Volume A

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Families of related MATLAB/Simulink systems commonly emerge ad hoc using clone-and-own practices. Extractively migrating systems towards a software product line (SPL) can be a remedy. A feature model (FM) represents all potential configurations of an SPL, ideally, in non-technical domain terms. However, yielding a sensible FM from automated synthesis remains a major challenge due to domain knowledge being a prerequisite for features to be adequate abstractions. In incremental reverse engineering, subsequent generation of FMs may further overwrite changes and design decisions made during previous manual FM refinement.In this paper, we propose an approach to largely automate the synthesis of a suitable FM from a set of cloned MATLAB/Simulink models as part of reverse engineering an SPL. We fully automate the extraction of an initial, i.e., a technical, FM that closely aligns with realization artifacts and their variability, and further provide operations to manually refine it to incorporate domain knowledge. Most importantly, we provide concepts to capture such operations and to replay them on a structurally different technical FM stemming from a subsequent reverse engineering increment that included further systems of the portfolio. We further provide an implementation and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using two MATLAB/Simulink data sets from the automotive domain. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software product lines; Software reverse engineering; Maintaining software.

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