EXtracting Product Lines from vAriaNTs (EXPLANT)
Project Summary
Software product lines (SPLs) enable systematic reuse and variability management of software artifacts. In practice, software is often reused in an ad-hoc manner by simply copying a system and adapting it to new requirements (called clone-and-own). Due to the lack of automatic and systematic management of artifacts, propagating changes (e.g., for bug fixing) and replacing functionality becomes expensive and error-prone.
The goal of our project is to migrate cloned product families into a structured, modular product line. Using code clone detection, architectural analyses, and domain knowledge we aim for a semi-automatic, semantics-preserving, stepwise transformation. In each step, a small semantics-preserving the code and/or the feature model is performed.
Cooperations and Funding
Project EXPLANT is funded by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)) under the grants SA 465/49-1 and LE 3382/2-1. It is a cooperation between the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg (OvGU) and the Harz University of Applied Science.
Project members of the first phase:
At OvGU (DFG grant SA 465/49-1):
- Prof. Dr. Gunter Saake
- Dipl.-Inf. Wolfram Fenske
At Harz University of Applied Science (DFG grant LE 3382/2-1):
- Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Leich
- M.Sc. Jacob Krüger
Since October 2017, Jacob Krüger attends Chalmers University of Technology for a research visit. The main purpose is to foster cooperations with industrial partners. Jacob Krüger's advisor at Chalmers University was
- Prof. Dr. Thorsten Berger
Project members of the second phase (EXPLANT 2.0):
At OvGU (DFG grant SA 465/49-1):
- Prof. Dr. Gunter Saake
- M.Sc. Jacob Krüger
At the Harz University of Applied Science (DFG grant LE 3382/2-1):
- Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Leich
- M.Sc. Sebastian Krieter
Awards
We received several awards that are and will be reported on in academic and popular media:
- Hugo-Junckers award 2016 as innovative alliance for FeatureIDE that we use and extend in our project (10,000 EUR).
- Best paper award at the International Conference on Generative Programming 2017 (GPCE'17) for Dipl.-Inf. Wolfram Fenske for the paper How Preprocessor Annotations (Do Not) Affect Maintainability: A Case Study on Change-Proneness.
- Research Award of the Wernigeröder Stadtwerkestiftung 2017 for M.Sc. Jacob Krüger for the article Composing Annotations Without Regret? Practical Experiences Using FeatureC (3,000 EUR).