REVaMP2 Project: Towards Round-Trip Engineering of Software Product Lines - Approach, Intermediate Results and Challenges

Abstract

The REVaMP2 Project is a major European effort towards Round-Trip Engineering of Software Product Lines for software intensive systems. Indeed, software is predominant in almost every modern industry. The importance of time-to-market has grown tremendously in many business domains. Organizations are in a constant search for approaches for mass production of highly customizable systems. The software product lines engineering approach promises to provide up to 10× speed increase benefits in time-to-market. Traditionally, automated tools proposed a top-down approach, i.e., variants were generated from a model of the product line. However, the industry used a bottom-up approach that helped to re-create a product line out of various clones of a system. This operation is very costly and error prone. The goal of REVaMP2 is to automate the process of extracting a product line from various system artifacts and help with verification and the co-evolution of the product line. The project involves 27 partners that contribute with diverse research and industrial practices to address case study challenges stemming from 11 application domains. In this paper, we would like to present the motivation for the project, the current approach, the intermediate results and challenges.