Middleware Specialization for Product-Lines Using Feature-Oriented Reverse Engineering

Supporting the varied software feature requirements of multiple variants of a software product-line while promoting reuse forces product line engineers to use general-purpose, feature-rich middleware platforms. However, each product variant now incurs memory footprint and performance overhead due to the feature-richness of the middleware along with the increased cost of its testing and maintenance. To address this tension, this paper presents FORMS (Feature-Oriented Reverse Engineering for Mmiddleware Specialization), which is a framework to automatically specialize general-purpose middleware for product-line variants. FORMS provides a novel model-based approach to map product-line variant-specific feature requirements to middleware specific features, which in turn are used to reverse engineer middleware source code and transform it to specialized forms resulting in vertical decompositions. Empirical results evaluating memory footprint reductions (40%) are presented along with qualitative evaluations of reduced maintenance efforts and an assessment of discrepancies in modularization of contemporary middleware.