Guiding Clone-and-Own When Creating Unplanned Products from a Software Product Line

Abstract

Clone-and-own is a simple and intuitive practice adopted to construct new product variants based on existing ones. However, when the developed family of products becomes rich, maintaining shared assets and managing variability between the clones become tedious tasks. Therefore, migrating the family of products into a software product line becomes essential. Despite that, software engineers remain interested in constructing new product variants that are not provided by the software product line. In this short paper, we briefly present our approach to guide software engineers in deriving new products from a software product line based on clone-and-own. This approach consists of proposing the possible configuration scenarios by means of operations to perform at asset level, in order to derive a new product variant.

Clone-and-Own software product derivation based on developer preferences and cost estimation

“…Moreover, we are interested in identifying additional metrics to refine the cost estimation function [22] by taking organizational factors in concern [23]. Finally, we aim to integrate our approach in a global software product line environment [24] to benefit from systematic reuse of existing products and variability management during configuration.…”

Customizable visualization of quality metrics for object-oriented variability implementations

“…Consequently, they do not define features at a domain level in a formal model, and these features are not consistently documented or made explicit in the code assets. While some organizations adopt a clone-and-own approach [31,74] to handle variability, with many disadvantages [23,32], our work focuses on object-oriented variability-rich systems that manage variability in a single codebase.…”