An Ontological Approach for Identifying Software Variants: Specialization and Template Instantiation

Software is a crucial component of many products and often is a product in itself. Software artifacts are typically developed for particular needs. Often, identifying software variants is important for increasing reuse, reducing time and costs of development and maintenance, increasing quality and reliability, and improving productivity. We propose a method for utilizing variability mechanisms of Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) to allow identification of variants of software artifacts. The method is based on an ontological framework for representing variability of behaviors. We demonstrate the feasibility of the method on two common variability mechanisms – specialization and template instantiation. The method has been implemented using reverse engineered code. This provides a proof-of-concept of its feasibility.