IsiSPL: Toward an Automated Reactive Approach to build Software Product Lines

Over the past decades, Software Product Lines (SPLs) have demonstrated the benefits of systematic reuse to increase software development productivity and software product quality. Of the three adoption approaches, i.e. extractive, proactive and reactive, the reactive approach seems the most suitable for software development in practice. The strength of this approach is that it remains close to classical software development practices. In fact, it avoids a complete analysis of the business domain and its variability (i.e. proactive approach), and avoids requiring a set of product variants that covers this domain (i.e. extractive approach). Nevertheless, despite these advantages, we believe that the main obstacle of the reactive approach adoption is the lack of automation of its re-engineering process. This paper proposes isiSPL: a reactive-based approach that facilitates both construction and maintenance of an SPL. The construction of the SPL is based on a quasi-automatic process. The maintenance of the SPL can be made on a white-box SPL implementation, generated by isiSPL. isiSPL is based on two steps: first, the identification and integration of the artefacts of a newly created product into the structure of the SPL; second, the selection of a set of artefacts and their composition to generate a new product that can either partially or completely meet the requirements provided for a product intended by a developer. We have implemented isiSPL and validated its integration and generation using the two different sets of products from ArgoUML-SPL and Soduko-SPL.