Recovering variability information from source code of clone-and-own software systems
Alexander Schlie, Sandro Schulze, Ina Schaefer · 2020
Clone-and-own prevails as an ad-hoc reuse strategy that addresses changing requirements by copying and modifying existing system variants. Proper documentation is typically not cherished and knowledge about common and varying parts between individual variants, denoted their variability information, is lost with a growing system family. With overall maintainability impaired in the longrun, software product lines (SPLs) or concepts thereof, can be a remedy. However, migrating a system family towards structured reuse requires a prior recovery of the systems' variability information. For software systems resulting from clone-and-own, this information is not explicitly available and recovering it remains an open challenge.