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Reengineering legacy applications into software product lines: a systematic mapping

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Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of systems that share common assets allowing a disciplined reuse. Rarely SPLs start from scratch, instead they usually start from a set of existing systems that undergo a reengineering process. Many approaches to conduct the reengineering process have been proposed and documented in research literature. This scenario is a clear testament to the interest in this research area. We conducted a systematic mapping study to provide an overview of the current research on reengineering of existing systems to SPLs, identify the community activity in regarding of venues and frequency of publications in this field, and point out trends and open issues that could serve as references for future research. This study identified 119 relevant publications. These primary sources were classified in six different dimensions related to reengineering phases, strategies applied, types of systems used in the evaluation, input artefacts, output artefacts, and tool support. The analysis of the results points out the existence of a consolidate community on this topic and a wide range of strategies to deal with different phases and tasks of the reengineering process, besides the availability of some tools. We identify some open issues and areas for future research such as the implementation of automation and tool support, the use of different sources of information, need for improvements in the feature management, the definition of ways to combine different strategies and methods, lack of sophisticated refactoring, need for new metrics and measures and more robust empirical evaluation. Reengineering of existing systems into SPLs is an active research topic with real benefits in practice. This mapping study motivates new research in this field as well as the adoption of systematic reuse in software companies.

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Notes

  1. 1 Alternative term spellings or upper/lower case are not shown in the table and were found not to be relevant for our searches.

  2. 2 Some databases have a limit of character for the search string. In these cases the search query used was: ("feature location" OR "concept location" OR "concern location" OR "feature mining") AND (reengineering OR refactoring OR reconstruction OR migration OR migrating ) AND ("product line" OR "product-line" OR "product family" OR "program family")

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Brazilian Agencies CAPES: 007126/2014-00 and CNPq: 453678/2014-9 and 305358/2012-0, and Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 25289-N15.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DInf, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), CP: 19081, CEP: 81.531-980, Curitiba, Brazil

    Wesley K. G. Assunção & Silvia R. Vergilio

  2. COTSI, Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR), Cristo Rei Street, 19. CEP: 85.902-490, Toledo, Brazil

    Wesley K. G. Assunção

  3. Department of Software Engineering and IT, École de Technologie Supérieure, (ÉTS), Notre-Dame Street Ouest. 1100, H3C 1K3, Montreal, Canada

    Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon

  4. ISSE, Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU), Altenbergerstr. 69, 4040, Linz, Austria

    Lukas Linsbauer & Alexander Egyed

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Assunção, W.K.G., Lopez-Herrejon, R.E., Linsbauer, L. et al. Reengineering legacy applications into software product lines: a systematic mapping. Empir Software Eng 22, 2972–3016 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9499-z

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