Co-evolution Analysis for Software Product Lines

The purpose of our approach is to study the co-evolution of the platform and the products of software product lines. Because the platform must be able to derive all the family products, products are not allowed to evolve independently from the plateform, thus the propagation of the products changes must be managed efficiently. Instead of focusing on the change impact analysis we propose an approach to compare the evolution histories of the products and the platform illustrated through evolutionary trees built using the biological technique cladistics. This comparison yields important results concerning the change propagation. In this paper, we introduce the use of cladistics for software product lines to build evolutionary trees for platform and products, then we elaborate a mathematical analysis to compare these trees, afterwards we validate this work through a case study (mobile media software product lines). We also provide the design of an automated tool.