Analyzing Variability in 25 Years of Industrial Legacy Software
Kamil Rosiak, Oliver Urbaniak, Alexander Schlie, Christoph Seidl, Ina Schaefer · 2019
In certain domains, safety-critical software systems may remain operational for decades. To comply with changing requirements, new system variants are commonly created by copying and modifying existing ones. Typically denoted clone-and-own, software quality and overall maintainability are adversely affected in the long-run. With safety being pivotal, a fault in one variant may require the entire portfolio to be assessed. Thus, engineers need to maintain legacy systems dating back decades, implemented in programming languages such as Pascal. Software product lines (SPLs) can be a remedy but migrating legacy systems requires their prior analysis and comparison. For industrial software systems, this remains a challenge.