CodeScoping: A Source Code Based Tool to Software Product Lines Scoping

Software Product Lines Engineering focuses on identifying and managing the commonalities and variabilities of a set of software products where core assets can be developed and (re)used to derive individual product variants with reduced costs. In this context, software product line scoping is the process responsible for identifying and delimiting products, features, sub-domains and existing assets of the product line where there are economical benefits to invest in reuse. Typically, product line engineers elicit scoping information from the available documentation of existing products and based on knowledge from domain experts. This is an effort-intensive task because much time is invested in workshops and interviews with the domain and system experts. Thus, in order to reduce costs and time in the scoping process, this paper proposes an approach to support the scoping process based on the existing products source code.