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).

Publications

2021

  • Sebastian Krieter, Rahel Arens, Michael Nieke, Chico Sundermann, Tobias Heß, Thomas Thüm, and Christoph Seidl. Incremental construction of modal implication graphs for evolving feature models. In Mohammad Mousavi and Pierre-Yves Schobbens, editors, SPLC '21: 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, Leicester, United Kingdom, September 6-11, 2021, Volume A, pages 64–74. ACM, 2021.
     
  • Tobias Pett, Sebastian Krieter, Tobias Runge, Thomas Thüm, Malte Lochau, and Ina Schaefer. Stability of Product-Line Samplingin Continuous Integration. In Paul Grünbacher, Christoph Seidl, Deepak Dhungana, and Helena Lovasz-Bukvova, editors, VaMoS'21: 15th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems, Virtual Event / Krems, Austria, February 9-11, 2021, pages 18:1–18:9. ACM, 2021.
     
  • Tobias Pett, Sebastian Krieter, Thomas Thüm, Malte Lochau, and Ina Schaefer. AutoSMP: an evaluation platform for sampling algorithms. In Mohammad Mousavi and Pierre-Yves Schobbens, editors, SPLC '21: 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, Leicester, United Kindom, September 6-11, 2021, Volume B, pages 41–44. ACM, 2021.
     
  • Chico Sundermann, Tobias Heß, Dominik Engelhardt, Rahel Arens, Johannes Herschel, Kevin Jedelhauser, Benedikt Jutz, Sebastian Krieter, and Ina Schaefer. Integration of UVL in FeatureIDE. In Mohammad Mousavi and Pierre-Yves Schobbens, editors, SPLC '21: 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, Leicester, United Kindom, September 6-11, 2021, Volume B, pages 73–79. ACM, 2021.
     

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

  • Wolfram Fenske, Thomas Thüm, and Gunter Saake. A Taxonomy of Software Product Line Reengineering. In Proc. Int’l Work. on Variability Modeling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMoS ’14), pages 4:1–4:8, New York, NY, USA, January 2014. ACM.
     

 Theses

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

Last Modification: 18.11.2021 - Contact Person: