Embedded Software Revitalization through Component Mining and Software Product Line Techniques

The mining of generic software components from legacy systems can be used as an auxiliary technique to revitalize systems. This paper presents a software maintenance approach that uses such technique to revitalize one or more embedded legacy systems simultaneously and, in addition, create a core of reusable assets that can be used to support the development of new similar products. Software Product Line techniques are used to support the tasks of domain modelling and software component development. A real case study in the domain of Point of Sale (POS) terminals is presented and it illustrates the use of the proposed approach to revitalize three similar embedded legacy systems, simultaneously. It also shows how it is possible, through the created core of reusable assets, to deliver variations of these systems to meet the requirements of a wide family of POS terminals with different hardware configurations.