Building Families of Software Products for e-Learning Platforms: A Case Study

Applications for e-learning platforms must deal with certain variability inherent to their domain. For example, these applications must be adapted to the variations of each teaching-learning process. Thus, they must be changed manually, according to the particular environment in which they will be deployed. This manual adaptation process is costly and error-prone. Our hypothesis is that software product line (SPL) engineering, whose goal is the effective production of similar software systems, can help to alleviate this problem. This paper illustrates this idea by refactoring an e-learning application named E-Learning Web Miner in a SPL. The benefits obtained are highlighted and analyzed.