Extractive software product line engineering using model-based delta module generation

To satisfy demand for customized products, companies commonly apply so-called clone-and-own strategies by copying functionality from existing products and modifying it to create product variants that have to be developed, maintained, and evolved in isolation. In previous work, we introduced a variability mining technique to identify variability information (commonalities and differences) in block-based model variants (e.g., MATLAB/Simulink models), which can be used to guide manual transition from clone-and-own to managed reuse of a software product line (SPL). In this paper, we present a procedure that uses the extracted variability information to generate a transformational delta-oriented SPL fully automatically. We generate a delta language specifically tailored to transforming models in the analyzed modeling language and utilize it to generate delta modules expressing variation of the SPL's implementation artifacts. The procedure seamlessly integrates with our variability mining technique and allows to fully adopt a managed reuse strategy (i.e., generation of products from a single code base) without manual overhead. We show the feasibility of the procedure by applying it to state chart and MATLAB/Simulink model variants from two industrial case studies.