: Software product lines extraction driven by language server protocol

Abstract

Software product lines (SPL) describe highly-variable software systems as a family of similar products that differ in terms of the features they provide. The promise of SPL engineering is to enable massive software reuse by allowing software features to be reused across a variety of different products made for several customers. However, there are some disadvantages in the extraction of SPLs from standard applications. Most notably, approaches to the development of SPLs are not supported by the base language and use a syntax and composition techniques that require a deep understanding of the tools being used. Therefore, the same features cannot be used in a different application and developers must face a steep learning curve when developing SPLs for the first time or when switching from one approach to a different one. Ultimately, this problem is due to a lack of standards in the area of SPL engineering and in the way SPLs are extracted from variability-unaware applications. In this work, we present a framework based on LSP and dubbed ▪ that aims at standardizing such a process by decoupling the refactoring operations made by the user from the effect they have on the source code. This way, the server for a specific SPL development approach can be used across several development environments that provide clients with customized refactoring options. Conversely, the developers can use the same client to refactor SPLs made according to different approaches without needing to learn the syntax of each approach. To showcase the applicability of the approach, we present an evaluation performed by refactoring four SPLs according to two different approaches: the results show that a minimal implementation of the ▪ client and server applications can be used to reduce the effort of extracting an SPL up to the 93% and that it can greatly reduce or even completely hide the implementation details from the developer, depending on the chosen approach.