Transitioning Legacy Assets to a Product Line Architecture

Abstract

A successful software system evolves over time, but this evolution often occurs in an ad-hoc fashion. One approach to structure system evolution is the concept of software product lines where a core architecture supports a variety of application contexts. However, in practice, the high cost and high risks of redevelopment as well as the substantial investments made to develop the existing systems most often mandate significant leverage of the legacy assets. Yet, there is little guidance in the literature on how to transition legacy assets into a product line set-up. In this paper, we present RE-PLACE, an approach developed to support the transition of existing software assets towards a product line architecture while taking into account anticipated new system variants. We illustrate this approach with its application in an industrial setting

Agile product line planning: A collaborative approach and a case study

“…Rather, companies with successful products in the market adopt a product line approach as soon as maintaining a family of largely similar products becomes too costly and time-consuming (Bayer et al, 1999a(Bayer et al, , 2004Clements and Northrop, 2001;Ebert and Smouts, 2003;Peterson, 2003). Product line adoption under such circumstances is referred to as reengineering-driven product line development (Schmid and Verlage, 2002).…”

Cloned product variants: from ad-hoc to managed software product lines

“…Several works [3,13,26,28,29] capture guidelines and techniques for manually transforming legacy product line artifacts into SPLE representations. Some also introduce automatic approaches to reorganize product variants into annotative representations [30,34,45,48].…”

“…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.…”

Implementation Issues in Product Line Scoping

“…Additionally, if the entry point is reengineering-driven or integrating product line, pre-existing architectures or architectural parts do heavily influence the architectural style choice. The reason for this is twofold, the existing architecture already has its own style [18], and, while using existing parts, architectural mismatches must be either avoided or handled appropriately [19]. The impacts suggested by the environmental factors discussed in section 2.1 will be discussed shortly.…”