CodeScoping: A Source Code Based Tool to Software Product Lines Scoping

Software Product Lines Engineering focuses on identifying and managing the commonalities and variabilities of a set of software products where core assets can be developed and (re)used to derive individual product variants with reduced costs. In this context, software product line scoping is the process responsible for identifying and delimiting products, features, sub-domains and existing assets of the product line where there are economical benefits to invest in reuse. Typically, product line engineers elicit scoping information from the available documentation of existing products and based on knowledge from domain experts. This is an effort-intensive task because much time is invested in workshops and interviews with the domain and system experts. Thus, in order to reduce costs and time in the scoping process, this paper proposes an approach to support the scoping process based on the existing products source code.

I. Introduction

Software Product Lines Engineering (SPLE) has rapidly emerged as an important software development approach during the last few years [1]. SPLE focuses on identifying and managing the commonalities and variabilities of a set of software products where core assets can be developed and (re)used to derive individual product variants with reduced costs. Improvements of productivity, quality, and reduction of development costs and time to market are some of the benefits provided by the approach. However, to take advantage of these benefits, an organization needs to transition from single software development to a product line paradigm. In order to support the organizations in this transition, Krueger proposed three adoption models (proactive, reactive and extractive), allowing an organization to select the most suitable, depending on its objectives, budget, time and requirements [2].