Software product line platform construction for migration from the clone-and-own approach to developing software product families

Companies often develop new software conveniently and quickly with the clone-and-own (CAO) approach of copying and modifying existing artifacts. However, this development approach makes maintenance and tracking reuse opportunities more difficult as the number of products grows. Software product line engineering (SPLE) solves this problem of the CAO approach by constructing a platform that consists of reusable software assets, facilitating efficient development of a product family. So, migrating a product family that has been developed with the CAO approach to SPLE is a practical first step for many companies to realizing SPLE but it requires building a product line platform that can create products by identifying and integrating cloned codes among products in the product family. To help achieve that, this article proposes an approach that (i) extracts reusable common and variable code assets from the products developed with the CAO approach, (ii) automatically builds a reusable product line platform, and (iii) generates products based on the platform. We applied the proposed approach to seven subjects, and confirmed that the proposed approach automatically and correctly builds a product line platform capable of generating the original products in an efficient and scalable manner.