Middleware Specialization for Product-Lines using Feature-Oriented Reverse Engineering

Abstract—Supporting the varied software feature requirements of multiple variants of a software product-line while promoting reuse forces product line engineers to use general-purpose, feature-rich middleware platforms. However, each product vari-ant now incurs memory footprint and performance overhead due to the feature-richness of the middleware along with the increased cost of its testing and maintenance. To address this tension, this paper presents FORMS (Feature-Oriented Reverse Engineering for Mmiddleware Specialization), which is a framework to auto-matically specialize general-purpose middleware for product-line variants. FORMS provides a novel model-based approach to map product-line variant-specific feature requirements to middleware-specific features, which in turn are used to reverse engineer middleware source code and transform it to specialized forms resulting in vertical decompositions. Empirical results evaluating memory footprint reductions (40%) are presented along with qualitative evaluations of reduced maintenance efforts and an assessment of discrepancies in modularization of contemporary middleware