A Co-Evolution Analysis for Software Product Lines: An Approach based on Evolutionary Trees

In this rapidly changing world, business strategies continuously evolve to meet customers' wishes. Hence, the ability to cope with the frequent business changes is becoming important criteria of a leading development paradigm. Software product line engineering is a development paradigm based on reuse that builds a common platform from which a set of applications can be derived. Despite its advantage of enhancing time to market and costs, it is exposed to the risk of falling into the aging phenomenon because of the complexity of its evolution. In this paper the authors present a co-evolution based approach for protecting the software product lines from the aging phenomenon. The approach uses cladistics and trees reconciliation that are mainly used in biology to analyze the co-evolution between organisms. The authors' major goal is to find out changes of products that were not propagated to the common platform at the aim of reconsidering them in the platform and thus protecting it from being obsolete.