Early analysis of modularity in software product lines

Abstract

Software Product Lines has emerged as a new technology to develop software product families based on the combination of a set of common and variable assets. However, in order to combine these assets to build different products, coupling between common and variable parts must be highly reduced. In that sense, crosscutting features make evolution and adaptability of software difficult. In this paper we propose a framework to identify crosscutting features at early stages in order to use aspect-oriented techniques to modularize them and reduce their dependencies. This framework is based on a crosscutting pattern and uses traceability matrices to automatically perform the analysis of crosscutting by means of syntactical and dependencies based analyses. Applicability of the framework is shown by identifying crosscutting features in the MobileMedia product line.