Transitioning legacy assets to a product line architecture

  • Authors:

  • Joachim Bayer;Jean-François Girard;Martin Würthner;Jean-Marc DeBaud;Martin Apel

  • Affiliations:

  • Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany;Lucent PaceLine Technologies, Naperville, IL;Tecmath GmbH & Co. KG, Kaiserslautern, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ESEC/FSE-7 Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

A successful software system evolves over time, but this evolution often occurs in an ad-hoc fashion. One approach to structure system evolution is the concept of software product lines where a core architecture supports a variety of application contexts. However, in practice, the high cost and high risks of redevelopment as well as the substantial investments made to develop the existing systems most often mandate significant leverage of the legacy assets. Yet, there is little guidance in the literature on how to transition legacy assets into a product line set-up.In this paper, we present RE-PLACE, an approach developed to support the transition of existing software assets towards a product line architecture while taking into account anticipated new system variants. We illustrate this approach with its application in an industrial setting.