Reengineering legacy software products into software product line based on automatic variability analysis

In order to deliver the various and short time-to-market software products to customers, the paradigm of Software Product Line (SPL) represents a new endeavor to the software development. To migrate a family of legacy software products into SPL for effective reuse, one has to understand commonality and variability among existing products variants. The existing techniques rely on manual identification and modeling of variability, and the analysis based on those techniques is performed at several mutually independent levels of abstraction. We propose a sandwich approach that consolidates feature knowledge from top-down domain analysis with bottom-up analysis of code similarities in subject software products. Our proposed method integrates model differencing, clone detection, and information retrieval techniques, which can provide a systematic means to reengineer the legacy software products into SPL based on automatic variability analysis.