Feature Identification from the Source Code of Product Variants

Abstract : In order to migrate software products which are deemed similar into a product line, it is essential to identify the common features and the variations between the product variants. This can however be tedious and error-prone as it may involve browsing complex software and a lot of more or less similar variants. Fortunately, if arte facts of the product variants (source code files and/or models) are available, feature identification can be at least partially automated. In this paper, we thus propose a three-step approach to feature identification from source code of which the first two steps are automated.