FORMS: Feature-Oriented Reverse Engineering-based Middleware Specialization for Product-Lines

Supporting the varied software feature requirements of multiple variants of a software product-line while promoting reuse, forces product line engineers to use general-purpose and feature-rich middleware platforms. However, each product variant now incurs memory footprint and performance overhead due to the feature-richness of the middleware along with the increased cost of its testing and maintenance. To address this tension, this paper presents FORMS (Feature-Oriented Reverse Engineering for Middleware Specialization), which is a framework to automatically specialize general-purpose middleware for productline variants. FORMS provides a novel model-based approach to map product-line variant-specific feature requirements to middleware-specific features, which in turn are used to reverse engineer middleware source code and transform it to specialized forms resulting in vertical middleware decompositions. Empirical results evaluating memory footprint reductions (40%) and feature reductions (60-76%) are presented along with qualitative assessment of discrepancies in modularization of contemporary middleware.