Improving product copy consolidation by architecture-aware difference analysis

Software product lines (SPL) are a well-known concept to efficiently develop product variants. However, migrating customised product copies to a product line is still a labour-intensive challenge due to the required comprehension of differences among the implementations and SPL design decisions. Most existing SPL approaches are focused on forward engineering. Only few aim to handle SPL evolution, but even those lack support of variability reverse engineering, which is necessary for migrating product copies to a product line. In this paper, we present our continued concept on using component architecture information to enhance a variability reverse engineering process. Including this information particularly improves the difference identification as well as the variation point analysis and -aggregation steps. We show how the concept can be applied by providing an illustrating example.