• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.337-352
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• 2017

Clone-and-own reuse is an approach to creating new software variants by copying and modifying existing software products. A family of legacy software products developed by clone-and-own reuse often requires high maintenance cost and tends to be error-prone due to patch-ups without refactoring and structural degradation. To overcome these problems, many organizations that have used clone-and-own reuse now want to migrate their legacy products to software product line (SPL) for more systematic reuse and management of software asset. However, with most of existing methods, variation points are embedded directly into design and code rather than modeled and managed separately; variation points are not created ("engineered") systematically based on a variability model. This approach causes the following problems: it is difficult to understand the relationships between variation points, thus it is hard to maintain such code and the asset tends to become error-prone as it evolves. Also, when SPL evolves, design/code assets tend to be modified directly in an ad-hoc manner rather than engineered systematically with appropriate refactoring. To address these problems, we propose a feature-oriented method for extracting a SPL asset from a family of legacy applications. With the approach, we identify and model variation points and their relationships in a feature model separate from implementation, and then extract and manage a SPL asset from legacy applications based on the feature model. We have applied the method to a family of legacy Notepad++ products and demonstrated the feasibility of the method.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2023

Similar software is often developed with the Clone-And-Own (CAO) approach that copies and modifies existing artifacts. The CAO approach is considered as a bad practice because it makes maintenance difficult as the number of cloned products increases. Software product line engineering is a methodology that can solve the issue of the CAO approach by developing a product family through systematic reuse. Migrating product families that have been developed with the CAO approach to the product line engineering begins with finding, integrating, and building them as reusable assets. However, cloning occurs at various levels from directories to code lines, and their structures can be changed. This makes it difficult to build product line code base simply by finding clones. Successful migration thus requires unifying the source code's file path, class name, and method signature. This paper proposes a clustering method that identifies a set of similar codes scattered across product variants and some of their method full paths are different, so path unification is necessary. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted an experiment using the Apo Games product line, which has evolved with the CAO approach. As a result, the average precision of clustering performed without preprocessing was 0.91 and the number of identified common clusters was 0, whereas our method showed 0.98 and 15 respectively.