M. Nöbauer, N. Seyff, I. Groher: Similarity Analysis within Product Line Scoping: An Evaluation of a Semi-Automatic Approach, 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAISE 2014), LNCS 8484, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, Thessaloniki, Greece, June 16-20, 2014, pp. 165-179 doi:10.1007/978-3-319-07881-6_12.
Introducing a product line approach in an organization requires a systematic scoping phase to decide what products and features should be included. Product line scoping is a non-trivial activity and traditionally consumes a lot of time and resources. This issue highlights the need to complement traditional scoping activities with semi-automatic approaches that allow to initially estimate the potential for reuse with small efforts. In this paper we present an evaluation of a tool-supported approach that enables the semi-automatic analysis of existing products in order to calculate their similarity. This approach is tailored to be used within the configuration-based systems domain, where we have used it to identify similarity within two types of industrial standard software products. The results of this evaluation highlight that our approach provides accurate results and leads to time savings compared to manual similarity analysis.