Recovering Software Product Line Architecture of Product Variants Developed with the Clone-and-Own Approach

Abstract

Software products developed with the clone-and-own approach pose difficulties in maintenance. Migrating to software product line can solve this problem. This paper proposes an approach to recover software product line architecture (PLA) from a family of products developed with the clone-and-own approach. The proposed approach decomposes all source code of the family of products and analyses cloned copy classes, cloned modification classes and product-specific classes. From the results, it recovers a PLA. For determining common and variable classes, the proposed approach uses Harmonized Total Constant Commonality Indices of packages or classes of a product line (HTCCIPL). We apply our approach to recover the PLA of the Apo-Games developed with the clone-and-own approach. The results show that our approach recovers the Apo-Games PLA with a set of guidelines that can assist product line engineers in making decisions on commonality and variability of architectural elements of a PLA.