Automatic and Incremental Product Optimization for Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines (SPLs) have gained popularity in industry as they foster the reuse of artifacts, such as code, and reduce product development effort. Although some SPLs ensure that only valid products are configurable, those products are not necessarily optimal. For instance, they may include code that is not necessary for providing the desired functionality -- often because of erroneous traceability between features and code. Such unnecessary code may be disallowed in safety critical domains, it may lead to losses in runtime performance, or it may lead to errors during later SPL evolution. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic and incremental product optimization. Our approach leverages product functionality tests to ensure that configured products do not include unnecessary artifacts -- an automatic re-optimization of products after SPL evolution is performed incrementally. The evaluation results show that such a re-optimization takes only milliseconds.