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Software product line extraction from variability-rich systems: the robocode case study

The engineering of a Software Product Line (SPL), either by creating it from scratch or through the re-engineering of existing variants, it uses to be a project that spans several years with a high investment. It is often hard to analyse and quantify this investment, especially in the context of extractive SPL adoption when the related software variants are independently created by different developers following different system architectures and implementation conventions. This paper reports an experience on the creation of an SPL by re-engineering system variants implemented around an educational game called Robocode. The objective of this game is to program a bot (a battle tank) that battles against the bots of other developers. The world-wide Robocode community creates and maintains a large base of knowledge and implementations that are mainly organized in terms of features, although not presented as an SPL. Therefore, a group of master students analysed this variability-rich domain and extracted a Robocode SPL. We present the results of such extraction augmented with an analysis and a quantification regarding the spent time and effort. We believe that the results and the a-posteriori analysis can provide insights on global challenges on SPL adoption. We also provide all the elements to SPL educators to reproduce the teaching activity, and we make available this SPL to be used for any research purpose.