Cross Product Line Feature Analysis

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) promotes the development and maintenance of artifacts that can be reused in families of related software-intensive systems. As product lines are not necessarily disjoint and the development of product line artifacts is a demanding task, utilization of “related” or “similar” product line artifacts for creating or improving the artifacts of a particular product line may be desirable for reducing time and effort and improving quality. Commonly product line artifacts are represented as feature models. However, current feature analysis methods concentrate on individual product lines, neglecting the ability to share the knowledge and experience gained from developing other related product lines. In this work we offer adopting similarity measurements and text clustering techniques in order to enable cross product line feature analysis. The benefits of this type of analysis are two-folded. First, such analysis will enable extension and validation of existing feature models aiming at strengthening the advantages of existing product lines and reducing their limitations with respect to other related product lines. Second, extraction of domain knowledge, analyzing a set of artifacts representing different product lines in the domain, may yield new insights relevant to the entire domain, calling for formalization of these insights and their use when creating new products in the same domain. Preliminary results reveal that the suggested method helps systematically analyze the commonality and variability between related software product lines, providing insights regarding the specific product lines and the entire domain.