Analyzing Variability of Cloned Artifacts: Formal Framework and Its Application to Requirements.

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) promotes systematic reuse through variability mechanisms, such as configuration, parameterization, and inheritance. In reality, however, such reuse is many times done ad-hoc, resulting in several clones of the same product artifact which need to be managed in all development stages. To address this need, we provide in this paper a formal framework to represent dimensions of variability, which can be applied for identifying and analyzing variability automatically. The framework is based on the assumption that software artifacts can be modeled as graphs, and variability can be analyzed through examining the properties of mappings between the elements of these graphs. We demonstrate the potential usefulness of our framework by applying it to identify and analyze variability of functional requirements written in a natural language.