An Incremental Approach for the Extraction of Software Product Lines from Model Variants

In practice, a large amount of Software Product Lines (SPLs) are developed using a bottom-up process. In this case, an SPL is synthesized from similar product variants that are developed for SPL using ad hoc reuse techniques such as copy-paste-modify. In this paper, we present an approach for migrating existing product variants into an SPL. This approach is applied on models and it takes as input a set of models that abstract the product variants. The result of the approach is a software product line represented by the SPL model and the variability model. SPL model is the result of merging input product models. The variability model is a Feature Model (FM) allowing the specification of the variability on the SPL model. We propose to construct the SPL in an incremental way. After an initialization step, the set of input products are integrated in the SPL one after another. To integrate a new product, we first compare the input product model with the SPL model in order to identify the variability, and then we update both the SPL model and the variability model. The approach is implemented and evaluated on a case study.