Collaboration and source code driven bottom-up product line engineering

Companies that develop similar software systems often transition from single-system development to software product line development. In this transition, reusable assets are identified and incrementally created over a period of time. Bottom-up Software Product Line Engineering approaches aid stakeholders to identify variability from the legacy artifacts. One of these artifacts is the legacy source code. In this paper, we contribute the Collaboration and Source Code Driven Bottom-up approach, with two main enhancements. We apply clone detection and architecture reengineering techniques for identifying variability from the legacy artifacts. These techniques which have been traditionally used for maintaining software are now used for identifying variability and analyze code coupling and cohesion from the legacy code. Our second enhancement is improving stakeholder collaboration by guiding the domain experts in order to decide on variability. In particular, we apply Questions, Options and Criteria technique for capturing rationale and supporting collaboration.

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