Many companies develop software product lines by cloning and adapting artifacts of existing variants, but their development practices in these processes haven’t been systematically studied. This information vacuum threatens the approach’s validity and applicability and impedes process improvements.
An international group of industry and academic researchers presented a paper presented at the 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2013) that characterized the cloning culture in six industrial software product lines realized via code cloning. The paper describes the processes used, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. The authors further outline issues preventing the adoption of systematic software-reuse approaches and identify future research directions.
“An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines” and other papers from CSMR 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.
