Extracting of Features in Code Changes of Existing System for Reengineering to Product Line

Software maintenance becomes extremely difficult, especially caused by multiple versions in project-based or customer-oriented software development methodology. For reducing the maintenance cost, reengineering to software product line can be a solution to the software which either is a family of products nevertheless little different functionalities or are customized for each different customer's requirement. At an initial stage of the reengineering, the most important activity in software product line is feature extraction with respect to commonality and variability from the existing system due to verifying functional coverage. Several researchers have studied to extract features. They considered only a single version in a single product. However, this is an obstacle to classify the commonality and variability of features. Therefore, we propose a method for systematically extracting features from source code and its change history considering several versions of the existing system. It enables us to represent functionalities reflecting developer's intention, and to clarify the rationale of variation.