SPLicing TABASCO: custom-tailored software product line variants from taxonomy-based toolkits

Taxonomy-Based Software Construction (TABASCO) applies extensive domain analyses to create conceptual hierarchies of algorithmic domains. Those are used as basis for the implementation of software toolkits. The monolithic structure of TABASCO-based toolkits restricts their adoption on resource-constrained or special-purpose devices. In this paper, we address this problem by applying Software Product Line (SPL) techniques to TABASCO-based toolkits: We use software taxonomies as input to creating a conceptual representation of variability as feature models of an SPL. We apply the variability realization mechanism delta modeling to transform realization artifacts, such as source code, to only contain elements for a particular selection of features. Our method is suitable for proactive, reactive and extractive SPL development so that it supports a seamless adoption and evolution of an SPL approach for TABASCO-based toolkits. We demonstrate the feasibility of the method with three case studies by proactively, reactively and extractively transforming TABASCO-based toolkits to SPLs, which allow derivation of variants with custom-tailored functionality