research-article

Software product line extraction from variability-rich systems: the robocode case study

Authors:

Jabier Martinez,

Xhevahire Tërnava,

Tewfik ZiadiAuthors Info & Claims

SPLC '18: Proceedings of the 22nd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume 1

Pages 132 - 142

https://doi.org/10.1145/3233027.3233038

Published: 10 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The engineering of a Software Product Line (SPL), either by creating it from scratch or through the re-engineering of existing variants, it uses to be a project that spans several years with a high investment. It is often hard to analyse and quantify this investment, especially in the context of extractive SPL adoption when the related software variants are independently created by different developers following different system architectures and implementation conventions. This paper reports an experience on the creation of an SPL by re-engineering system variants implemented around an educational game called Robocode. The objective of this game is to program a bot (a battle tank) that battles against the bots of other developers. The world-wide Robocode community creates and maintains a large base of knowledge and implementations that are mainly organized in terms of features, although not presented as an SPL. Therefore, a group of master students analysed this variability-rich domain and extracted a Robocode SPL. We present the results of such extraction augmented with an analysis and a quantification regarding the spent time and effort. We believe that the results and the a-posteriori analysis can provide insights on global challenges on SPL adoption. We also provide all the elements to SPL educators to reproduce the teaching activity, and we make available this SPL to be used for any research purpose.

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Cited By

Brault YCollet PPinna-Dery A(2024)Visualizing Variability Implemented with Object-Orientation and Code Clones: A Tale of Two CitiesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3673037(107-112)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3673037
Chueca JBlasco DCetina CFont J(2024)Leveraging Phylogenetics in Software Product Families: The Case of Latent Content Generation in Video GamesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3672596(113-124)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672596
Horcas JBallesteros JPinto MFuentes L(2023)Elimination of constraints for parallel analysis of feature modelsProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608981(99-110)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579027.3608981
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Software product line extraction from variability-rich systems: the robocode case study
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Software engineering education
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability
        Software product lines
    2. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

SPLC '18: Proceedings of the 22nd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume 1

September 2018

324 pages

ISBN:9781450364645

DOI:10.1145/3233027

Editors:
Thorsten Berger
Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden
,
Paulo Borba
Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
,
Goetz Botterweck
University of Limerick, Ireland
,
Tomi Männistö
University of Helsinki, Finland
,
David Benavides
University of Seville, Spain
,
Sarah Nadi
University of Alberta, Canada
,
Timo Kehrer
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
,
Rick Rabiser
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
,
Christoph Elsner
Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany
,
Mukelabai Mukelabai
Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Copyright © 2018 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]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 September 2018

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ITEA3

Conference

SPLC '18

SPLC '18: 22nd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 10 - 14, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

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Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

Brault YCollet PPinna-Dery A(2024)Visualizing Variability Implemented with Object-Orientation and Code Clones: A Tale of Two CitiesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3673037(107-112)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3673037
Chueca JBlasco DCetina CFont J(2024)Leveraging Phylogenetics in Software Product Families: The Case of Latent Content Generation in Video GamesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3672596(113-124)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672596
Horcas JBallesteros JPinto MFuentes L(2023)Elimination of constraints for parallel analysis of feature modelsProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608981(99-110)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579027.3608981
Ghallab KZiadi TChalal Z(2023)Migrating Individual Applications into Software Product Lines Using the Mobioos Forge Platform2023 30th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC60848.2023.00060(483-492)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC60848.2023.00060
Chueca JTrasobares JDomingo ÁArcega LCetina CFont J(2023)Comparing software product lines and Clone and Own for game software engineering under two paradigmsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111824205:COnline publication date: 17-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111824
Trasobares JDomingo ÁArcega LCetina CFelfernig AFuentes L(2022)Evaluating the benefits of software product lines in game software engineeringProceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3546932.3546998(120-130)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546932.3546998
Mahmood WStrüber DAnjorin ABerger T(2022)Effects of variability in models: a family of experimentsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10112-327:3Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10112-3
Galasso JHuchard M(2022)Extending Boolean Variability Relationship Extraction to Multi-valued Software DescriptionsHandbook of Re-Engineering Software Intensive Systems into Software Product Lines10.1007/978-3-031-11686-5_6(143-173)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11686-5_6
Guégain ÉQuinton CRouvoy RMousavi MSchobbens P(2021)On reducing the energy consumption of software product linesProceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3461001.3471142(89-99)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3461001.3471142
Casquina JMontecchi LMousavi MSchobbens P(2021)A proposal for organizing source code variability in the git version control systemProceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3461001.3471141(82-88)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3461001.3471141
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