Towards a Better Understanding of Software Product Line Evolution

In contrast to traditional software systems, the evolution of a Software Product Line (SPL) a ects not only artifacts like source code or requirements, but also variability information, which supports the customization of these artifacts across di erent products of the SPL. While some work exists that aims at characterizing the state and evolution of a product line from a feature perspective, this abstracts away the details of code evolution, hence, ignoring aspects like the di erence in size of features. In this paper, we present an approach for the extraction and analysis of changes introduced to code, build, and variability model artifacts. This approach has been developed for and applied to the Linux product line.