Modelling and Correcting Duplication in Evolving Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are long-living systems that require inevitably continuous changes to product line models. Many studies in the literature have dealt with different challenges related to the evolution of software product lines. Among these challenges, the detection and correction of model defects have received a great interest. In this vein, our work addresses this challenge and focuses on a specific model defect, which is feature duplication. The main objectives of this paper are to propose a formal definition of feature duplication, to provide a meta-model that describes the dependencies between duplicationrelated concepts, and finally to present in details our solution to detect this defect in evolving software product lines. In order to illustrate our approach, we use an open source SPL called FeatureAMP