A mapping study of software architecture recovery for software product lines

Migrating a family of software systems from ad-hoc development approaches such as `clone-and-own' towards software product lines (SPL) is a challenging task. Software architecture recovery techniques can play a crucial role in such a migration. However, it is to date still unclear how these techniques, which have been mostly developed for single system architecture recovery in mind, can be utilized in an SPL context most effectively. In this paper, we present a mapping study examining 35 research articles with the purpose of discussing the current state of the art in applying software architecture recovery techniques for SPL and identifying potential research gaps in this area. The results provide evidence that currently used approaches do not seem to consider the potential architectural degradation that might exist in the family of systems to be migrated. Moreover, it is hard to generalize across empirical studies as currently it seems difficult to compare and benchmark the approaches applied for software product line architecture (SPLA) extraction/reconstruction.