An SOA approach for automating software product line adoption

Nowadays, the software industry is faced with challenges regarding complexity, time to market, quality standards and evolution. To face those challenges, two strategies that are gaining interest both in academy and industry are Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software Product Lines (SPL). While SOA aims at building applications from an orchestration of services, SPL consists in building a set of core-assets and a derivation strategy based on such assets. Adopting such approaches involves important challenges with regard to existing software artifacts that must be transformed in order to respect an architecture that focus on modularity and reuse. This paper presents an industrial experience of such transformation. We propose a non-intrusive reverse engineering process for the development of modular services obtained automatically from existing software artifacts, and a variability-driven derivation process to assembly products out of such services. To validate our approach, we have implemented the reverse engineering and derivation processes using real software JEE artifacts from a component framework of reusable functionalities in several different enterprise applications. The results show important benefits in terms of the development time and flexibility.