Visualizing product customization efforts for spotting SPL reuse opportunities

Abstract

Migrating a set of product variants to a managed SPL is rarely a one-shot effort. Experiences from industry revealed that a complete migration to an SPL might take years, during which customers' requirements still need to be fulfilled by the company (customization effort). Analyzing the assets that have been customized by products (customization analysis) becomes a main stepping stone in ascertaining reuse opportunities. This requires to remain vigilant to arising reuse opportunities not just at the SPL onset, but throughout the whole process. Traditionally, a common mechanism to identify reuse opportunities is the diff utility whereby differences between two files are calculated and displayed. But this mechanism might not scale up. Given the sheer number of both core-assets and SPL products, visualizations that abstract from conventional line-level diffs to higher level visualization are required to spot reuse opportunities a ta glance. To this end, we introduce visualizations that help to estimate the extent of the customization effort broken down by product and core-asset. The aim: a prompt insight into questions such as, how much effort are product developers spending on customization?; or, which core-assets needed a larger tuning to meet product requirements? This vision is realized in CUSTOMS, a visualization utility on top of FeatureHouse that resorts to alluvial diagrams and tree maps to display customization effort. CUSTOMS might serve as a first stepping stone for spotting reuse opportunities.