Top-down Feature Mining Framework for Software Product Line

Software product line engineering is regarded as a promising approach to generate tailored software products by referencing shared software artefacts. However, converting software legacy into a product line is extremely difficult, given the complexity, risk of the task and insufficient tool support. To cope with this, in this paper, we proposed a top-down feature-mining framework to facilitate developers extracting code fragments for features concerned. Our work aims to fulfill the following targets: (1) identify features at a fine granularity, (2) locate code fragments for concerned feature hierarchically and consistently, and (3) combine program analysis techniques and feature location strategies to improve mining performance. From our preliminary case studies, the top-down framework can effectively locate features and performs as good as Christians approach and performs better than the topology feature location approach.