Recovering Software Architecture Product Lines

Abstract

A large component and service-based software system exists in different forms, as different variants targeting different business needs and users. This kind of systems is provided as a set of "independent" products and not as a "single whole". Developers use ad hoc mechanisms to manage variability. However, for deriving new product variants that are built upon existing ones, the presence of a single model describing the architecture of the whole system with an explicit specification of commonality and variability is of great interest. Indeed, this enables them to see the invariant part of the whole, on top of which new functionality can be built, in addition to the different options they can use. We investigate in this work the use of software product line reverse engineering approaches, and in particular the framework named But4Reuse, for recovering an architecture model that enables us to build a Software Architecture Product Line (SAPL), from a set of software variants. We propose a generic process for recovering an architecture model of such a product line. We have instantiated this process for the OSGi Java framework and experimented it for building the architecture model of Eclipse IDE SPL. The results of this experimentation showed that this process can effectively reconstruct such an architecture model.

A novel approach for Software Architecture Product Line Engineering

“…Figure 11 shows the result of automatic feature naming of two identified Blocks. In fact, the block naming has been evaluated in our previous work [13]. We have compared our block names with names that are manually given by three domain experts with more than ten years of experience working on Eclipse development (see [14]).…”

“…In this work, we propose a novel approach for Software Architecture Product Line Engineering. The overall process of our approach was initially introduced in our previous work [13], which is substantially extended in this paper according two main dimensions: i) A more detailed and extended specification of the two steps. In particular, we describe the SAPL-Forward Engineering step in a new complete way, and ii) a new larger experimentation.…”

Ingeniería inversa aplicada en función del contexto

“…There are multiple approaches to recover the design of software products, classified into techniques (1)(2)(3)(4), tools (6)(7)(8)(9)(10), methods (11)(12)(13), and frameworks (5,(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Techniques detail how a specific activity of the reverse engineering process should be carried out.…”

“…The identified approaches apply activities defined by Tilley et al (19): data extraction, knowledge organization, and information exploration. Some focus on software product analysis (11), others on supporting evolution (12,20), on design reconstructing (12)(13)(14)(15)(16), or on product redesign (17). All are oriented towards the software engineering process, for maintenance, quality control, redesign, and asset reuse (21).…”

“…Cacophony (17) defines a generic process driven by metamodels. Kerdoudi et al (13) define a product lines design recovery process. Tamburri and Kazman (12) propose a generic method for architecture recovery.…”