Demonstration of a Toolchain for Feature Extraction, Analysis and Visualization on an Industrial Case Study

Abstract

Transforming a clone-and-own (i.e., new product variants are created by copying and modifying existing artifacts) code structure and development process to a Software Product Line Engineering (PLE) approach is a tedious and error-prone task. Holistic tool support for such a process is highly desirable, especially to lower efforts and to speed up the transformation. Unfortunately, such a holistic toolchain for reverse engineering of variability, supporting variant-centric and platform-centric extraction approaches is not available. In this paper, we present a toolchain covering the first steps for moving a clone-and-own product development to a PLE approach. We validate the first prototype of the toolchain on a case study consisting of industrial firmware for smart motor controllers and we show that even this early prototype reduces time and effort for moving to a configurable platform approach in the sense of PLE.