Abstract

Multiple-Domain Frameworks (MDF) are frameworks that provide variabilities to address several domains/subdomains. MDFs present difficulties such as (i) the presence of useless variabilities in the final releases and (ii) architectural inflexibility. The former affects the productivity of application engineers as they need to live together with variabilities which are useless to their domain. The latter prevents framework engineers from composing different framework configurations to attend more constrained domains. One alternative for solving this problem is to convert them into Framework Product Lines (FPL). FPL is a Software Product Line which members are frameworks, rather than complete applications, allowing that their members being created just with the variabilities required for a specific domain. Although this conversion process seems straightforward, the most challenging activity is the identification of the MDF subdomains and their mapping to the source code. This must be done because these subdomains will turn into the main features of the resulting FPL. In this paper we present an approach to assist this activity, which is schematically represented as an algorithm. The approach was evaluated by means of its application in an MDF called GRENJ. It was restructured into an FPL and a comparative study was conducted between the two versions. The results were promising regarding the number of useless variabilities and also in terms of the composability of the resulting architecture.