Towards a framework for feature deduplication during software product lines evolution

Software product lines are long-living systems that evolve continuously over time to satisfy the new requirements of customers. This evolution consists of adding or modifying features in the core platform of the product line or in derived products. As a result of this change, many model defects can occur, such as inconsistency and duplication. In this paper, we describe our work which proposes a framework to manage the software product line evolutions. The aim of the framework is to formalize the representation of the software product line models and the specifications of the new evolutions. Then, a set of algorithms are provided which enable the detection of feature duplication.