Investigating the variability impact on the recovery of software product line architectures

Abstract

The Product Line Architecture (PLA) of a Software Product Line (SPL) is the core architecture that represents a high-level design for all the products of an SPL, including variation points and variants. If PLA documentation is missing, it can be recovered by reverse engineering the products. The recovered PLA is a relevant asset for developers and architects, that can be used to drive specific activities of SPL development and evolution, such as, understanding its structure and its variation points, and assessing reuse. This paper presents an exploratory study that investigated the effectiveness of recovered PLAs to address variability identification and support reuse assessment. We recovered the PLA of 15 open source SPL projects using the PLAR, a tool that supports PLA recovery and assessment based on information extracted from SPL products' source code. For each project, reuse assessment was supported by existing reuse metrics. The yielded results revealed that the number of products used in PLA recovery affected the variability identification, and the number of optional features affected the components reuse rate. These findings suggest that a minimum set of representative products should be identified and selected for PLA recovery, and the component reuse rate is a candidate metric for SPL reuse assessment.