research-article

Towards clone-and-own support: locating relevant methods in legacy products

Authors:

Manuel Ballarin,

Carlos CetinaAuthors Info & Claims

SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

Pages 194 - 203

https://doi.org/10.1145/2934466.2934485

Published: 16 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Clone-and-Own (CAO) is a common practice in families of software products consisting of reusing code from methods in legacy products in new developments. In industrial scenarios, CAO consumes high amounts of time and effort without guaranteeing good results. We propose a novel approach, Computer Assisted CAO (CACAO), that given the natural language requirements of a new product, and the legacy products from that family, ranks the legacy methods in the family for each of the new product requirements according to their relevancy to the new development. We evaluated our approach in the industrial domain of train control software. Without CACAO, software engineers tasked with the development of a new product had to manually review a total of 2200 methods in the family. Results show that CACAO can reduce the number of methods to be reviewed, and guide software engineers towards the identification of relevant legacy methods to be reused in the new product.

References

[1]

V. Alves, C. Schwanninger, L. Barbosa, A. Rashid, P. Sawyer, P. Rayson, C. Pohl, and A. Rummler. An exploratory study of information retrieval techniques in domain analysis. In Software Product Line Conference, 2008. SPLC '08. 12th International, pages 67--76, Sept 2008.

Digital Library

[2]

M. Antkiewicz, W. Ji, T. Berger, K. Czarnecki, T. Schmorleiz, R. Lämmel, t. Stănciulescu, A. Wąsowski, and I. Schaefer. Flexible product line engineering with a virtual platform. In Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE Companion 2014, pages 532--535, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.

Digital Library

[3]

N. H. Bakar, Z. M. Kasirun, and N. Salleh. Feature extraction approaches from natural language requirements for reuse in software product lines. J. Syst. Softw., 106(C):132--149, Aug. 2015.

Digital Library

[4]

K. Czarnecki and A. Wasowski. Feature diagrams and logics: There and back again. In Software Product Lines, 11th International Conference, SPLC 2007, Kyoto, Japan, September 10-14, 2007, Proceedings, pages 23--34, 2007.

Digital Library

[5]

Y. Dubinsky, J. Rubin, T. Berger, S. Duszynski, M. Becker, and K. Czarnecki. An exploratory study of cloning in industrial software product lines. In Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), 2013 17th European Conference on, pages 25--34. IEEE, 2013.

Digital Library

[6]

H. Dumitru, M. Gibiec, N. Hariri, J. Cleland-Huang, B. Mobasher, C. Castro-Herrera, and M. Mirakhorli. On-demand feature recommendations derived from mining public product descriptions. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '11, pages 181--190, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.

Digital Library

[7]

A. D. Eisenberg and K. D. Volder. Dynamic feature traces: Finding features in unfamiliar code. In 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2005), 25-30 September 2005, Budapest, Hungary, pages 337--346, 2005.

Digital Library

[8]

A. Ferrari, G. O. Spagnolo, and F. Dell'Orletta. Mining commonalities and variabilities from natural language documents. In Proceedings of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference, SPLC '13, pages 116--120, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM.

Digital Library

[9]

A. Hulth. Improved automatic keyword extraction given more linguistic knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing, pages 216--223. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003.

Digital Library

[10]

T. Kamiya, S. Kusumoto, and K. Inoue. Ccfinder: a multilinguistic token-based code clone detection system for large scale source code. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 28(7):654--670, 2002.

Digital Library

[11]

C. Kästner, P. G. Giarrusso, T. Rendel, S. Erdweg, K. Ostermann, and T. Berger. Variability-aware parsing in the presence of lexical macros and conditional compilation. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2011, part of SPLASH 2011, Portland, OR, USA, October 22 - 27, 2011, pages 805--824, 2011.

Digital Library

[12]

T. K. Landauer, P. W. Foltz, and D. Laham. An introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse processes, 25(2-3):259--284, 1998.

[13]

Z. Li, S. Lu, S. Myagmar, and Y. Zhou. Cp-miner: Finding copy-paste and related bugs in large-scale software code. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 32(3):176--192, 2006.

Digital Library

[14]

D. Liu, A. Marcus, D. Poshyvanyk, and V. Rajlich. Feature location via information retrieval based filtering of a single scenario execution trace. In Proceedings of the Twenty-second IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE '07, pages 234--243, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

Digital Library

[15]

F. Liu, D. Pennell, F. Liu, and Y. Liu. Unsupervised approaches for automatic keyword extraction using meeting transcripts. In Proceedings of human language technologies: The 2009 annual conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics, pages 620--628. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009.

Digital Library

[16]

R. T.-W. Lo, B. He, and I. Ounis. Automatically building a stopword list for an information retrieval system. In Journal on Digital Information Management: Special Issue on the 5th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR), volume 5, pages 17--24. Citeseer, 2005.

[17]

S. Nadi, T. Berger, C. Kästner, and K. Czarnecki. Mining configuration constraints: static analyses and empirical results. In 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '14, Hyderabad, India - May 31 - June 07, 2014, pages 140--151, 2014.

Digital Library

[18]

N. H. Pham, H. A. Nguyen, T. T. Nguyen, J. M. Al-Kofahi, and T. N. Nguyen. Complete and accurate clone detection in graph-based models. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 276--286. IEEE Computer Society, 2009.

Digital Library

[19]

M. Porter. Snowball: A language for stemming algorithms, Oct. 2001.

[20]

D. Poshyvanyk, Y. Guéhéneuc, A. Marcus, G. Antoniol, and V. Rajlich. Feature location using probabilistic ranking of methods based on execution scenarios and information retrieval. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 33(6):420--432, 2007.

Digital Library

[21]

J. Rubin and M. Chechik. A framework for managing cloned product variants. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '13, pages 1233--1236, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2013. IEEE Press.

Digital Library

[22]

J. Rubin and M. Chechik. A survey of feature location techniques. In Domain Engineering, pages 29--58. Springer, 2013.

[23]

J. Rubin, A. Kirshin, G. Botterweck, and M. Chechik. Managing forked product variants. In Proceedings of the 16th International Software Product Line Conference - Volume 1, SPLC '12, pages 156--160, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.

Digital Library

[24]

P. Runeson and M. Höst. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical software engineering, 14(2):131--164, 2009.

Digital Library

[25]

H. Saif, M. Fernández, Y. He, and H. Alani. On stopwords, filtering and data sparsity for sentiment analysis of twitter. In LREC 2014, Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Proceedings., pages 810--817, 2014.

[26]

H. E. Salman, A. Seriai, and C. Dony. Feature location in a collection of product variants: Combining information retrieval and hierarchical clustering. In The 26th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Hyatt Regency, Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 1-3, 2013., pages 426--430, 2014.

[27]

G. Salton and M. J. McGill. Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1986.

Digital Library

[28]

S. She, R. Lotufo, T. Berger, A. Wasowski, and K. Czarnecki. Reverse engineering feature models. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2011, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 21-28, 2011, pages 461--470, 2011.

Digital Library

[29]

C. Silva and B. Ribeiro. The importance of stop word removal on recall values in text categorization. In Neural Networks, 2003. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on, volume 3, pages 1661--1666. IEEE, 2003.

[30]

C. Wohlin, P. Runeson, M. Höst, M. C. Ohlsson, B. Regnell, and A. Wesslén. Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.

Digital Library

[31]

Y. Xue, Z. Xing, and S. Jarzabek. Feature location in a collection of product variants. In 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2012, Kingston, ON, Canada, October 15-18, 2012, pages 145--154, 2012.

Digital Library

Cited By

Greiner SSchultheiß ABittner PThüm TKehrer T(2024)Give an Inch and Take a Mile? Effects of Adding Reliable Knowledge to Heuristic Feature TracingProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3672593(84-95)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672593
Kim TLee JKang S(2024)Cloned Code Clustering for the Software Product Line Engineering Approach to Developing a Family of Products2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00178(1350-1355)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00178
Saeedi Nikoo MKochanthara SBabur Övan den Brand M(2024)An empirical study of business process models and model clones on GitHubEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10584-z30:2Online publication date: 23-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10584-z
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Towards clone-and-own support: locating relevant methods in legacy products
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability

Recommendations

Variability debt in opportunistic reuse: A multi-project field study
Abstract
Technical debt is a metaphor to guide the identification, measurement, and general management of decisions that are appropriate in the short term but create obstacles in the future evolution and maintenance of systems. Variability management, ...
Highlights
- A field study analyzing issues of opportunistic reuse to create software variants.
- Evidences show that opportunistic reuse complicates the evolution of the variants.
- The variability debt phenomenon for opportunistic reuse is ...
Recovering software product line architecture of a family of object-oriented product variants

Automatic architecture recovery from a set of software product variants.Recovering variability concerning component, configuration, and dependencies.Experimented on two families of product variants. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) aims at ...
Identifying Issues and Concerns in Software Reuse in Software Product Lines
ICSR '09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Software Reuse: Formal Foundations of Reuse and Domain Engineering

One of the reasons for introducing software product lines (SPL) is the reduction of costs through reusing common assets for different products<em>. </em> Developing assets to be reused in different products is often not easy. Increasing complexity due ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 2016

367 pages

ISBN:9781450340502

DOI:10.1145/2934466

General Chair:
Hong Mei
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies: Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education
DC Holdings: Digital China Holdings Limited

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 September 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLC '16

Sponsor:

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies
DC Holdings

SPLC '16: The 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 16 - 23, 2016

Beijing, China

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

19
Total Citations
View Citations
154
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)15
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Greiner SSchultheiß ABittner PThüm TKehrer T(2024)Give an Inch and Take a Mile? Effects of Adding Reliable Knowledge to Heuristic Feature TracingProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3672593(84-95)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672593
Kim TLee JKang S(2024)Cloned Code Clustering for the Software Product Line Engineering Approach to Developing a Family of Products2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00178(1350-1355)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00178
Saeedi Nikoo MKochanthara SBabur Övan den Brand M(2024)An empirical study of business process models and model clones on GitHubEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10584-z30:2Online publication date: 23-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10584-z
Schultheiß ABittner PGreiner SKehrer T(2023)Benchmark Generation with VEVOS: A Coverage Analysis of Evolution Scenarios in Variant-Rich SystemsProceedings of the 17th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems10.1145/3571788.3571793(13-22)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571788.3571793
Businge JAbdi MDemeyer S(2023)Analyzing Variant Forks of Software Repositories from Social Coding PlatformsSoftware Ecosystems10.1007/978-3-031-36060-2_6(131-152)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36060-2_6
Ramkisoen PBusinge Jvan Bladel BDecan ADemeyer SDe Roover CKhomh FRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)PaReco: patched clones and missed patches among the divergent variants of a software familyProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549112(646-658)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3549112
Schultheis ABittner PThum TKehrer T(2022)Quantifying the Potential to Automate the Synchronization of Variants in Clone-and-Own2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00032(269-280)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00032
Do Carmo Felix Tdos Santos TDa Silva Morais IBentes IDos Santos Miranda VPires FSantos FGiuntini F(2022)A Strategy to Lead with Multiple Dependencies in a Coding Branch Structure: A Case Study with Mobile Device Production2022 International Conference on Computer Technologies (ICCTech)10.1109/ICCTech55650.2022.00024(101-109)Online publication date: Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCTech55650.2022.00024
Bittner PSchultheiß AThüm TKehrer TYoung JLinsbauer LSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)Feature trace recordingProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468531(1007-1020)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468264.3468531
Kehrer TThüm TSchultheiß ABittner PJuristo N(2021)Bridging the gap between clone-and-own and software product linesProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00013(21-25)Online publication date: 25-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00013
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten