Integrating Software Product Lines: A Study of Reuse versus Stability

To achieve large-scale reuse and accelerate time-to-market, integration of multiple software product lines (SPLs) is becoming a trend. The integration of independently-developed SPLs enables the derivation of new products on demand in a particular domain. The basic goal is to foster the reuse of previously-implemented features across a family of independently-developed SPLs. The programming technique employed in this context should promote the reuse of feature code across the SPLs with minimum change effort. Otherwise, the stability of the target SPLs would be compromised. This paper presents an exploratory study on the stepwise integration of three product lines from the board game domain. We investigate how the programming mechanisms supported by aspect-oriented and feature-oriented programming impacted the reuse and stability of those product lines. In particular, we also analyse and compare how the use of these mechanisms made possible to reach a better tradeoff of reuse and stability of the SPL designs.