Discovering Organizational Aspects from the Source Code History Log during the Product Line Planning Phase--A Case Study

How to introduce software product line engineering (PLE) in the presence of existing stand-alone similar systems remains a challenging question for many organizations. This paper reports on a reverse engineering approach to understanding the organizational aspects during the product line planning phase. The organizational aspects include domain expert identification, understanding the organization´s development or team structure, and predicting the existing product architecture using the organization´s architecture. In addition, this paper highlights how the source code change history log provides valuable data for various product line related activities, such as scoping, architecture evaluation, reengineering towards product line and project management in the product line context. The proposed approach is validated by means of the engine control systems of Hitachi. The results show that change history can be used to identify experts of the system or components, among other things