Similarity Analysis of Product-Line Variants

Many existing approaches have exploited the similarity notion to analyze software systems. In product-line engineering, similarity notion has been considered to fulfill analysis objectives, such as improving the testing effectiveness and reducing the testing efforts. However, most of the existing approaches consider in the similarity measurement only information of high level of abstraction, such as the feature selections of variants. In this paper, we present the notion of similarity in product-line engineering using different types of problem-space as well as solution-space information. In particular, we discuss different scenarios of measuring the similarity between variants and the possibility of combining different types of information to output the similarity between the compared variants. Moreover, we realized these scenarios in the industrial variant management tool pure::variants to fulfill analysis functionalities.