“…In reality, when the number of cloned variants is large and the differences between their implementations are significant, it becomes difficult to keep track of changes made to each of the variants, share features between them, reconcile changes, and establish new products (again, see Table 1 for the list of perceived shortcomings of cloning). The prevalent view in the SPLE community suggests that cloned product variants should be unified into a single-copy SPLE representation [3,13,19,22,23,26,28,29]-a direction that we refer to as merge-refactoring. Figure 2 shows one such representation for the vending machine variants in Fig.…”