Product Line Architecture Recovery: An Approach Proposal

The Product Line Architecture (PLA) is an important asset for the success of Software Product Line (SPL) projects. Due to the complexity of managing the architectural variability, maintain the PLA up-to-date and synchronized with the project source code is a hard problem. The systematic use of Software Architecture Recovery (SAR) techniques enables the PLA recovery and keeps the PLA aligned with the development. In this context, we present our initial proposal that consists of an approach to recover PLAs based on the use of (bottom-up) SAR techniques. We performed some studies (such as surveys, literature reviews, and exploratory studies) to investigate the relationship between SAR and PLA to identify gaps and define the research area state-of-the-art. The combination of SAR and PLA is an important strategy to address some issues of PLA design. We identified that few studies address architectural variability, PLA variability traceability, and empirical evaluation such as experiments, surveys, mixed-methods, and so on.