Software-Commonality in Production Systems: How to Systematically Identify Commonalities and Variabilities?

In industrial production systems, heterogeneous software solutions for machines often evolve over many years. Although these solutions frequently exhibit functional overlap, they are largely developed and maintained independently, resulting in increased maintenance effort and unnecessary costs. This talk introduces a practice‑oriented approach for systematically identifying commonalities and variabilities in these software solutions. The outcome is a feature diagram that captures the commonalities and variabilities and serves as a basis for extracting a software product line. Each step of the approach is illustrated with a real‑world example from an industrial production environment.

Value for the audience:
The talk aims at industrial practitioners who struggle with heterogeneous and legacy software landscapes in production systems. We present a lightweight and practical approach to identify commonalities and variabilities in this challenging software environment as a first step for extracting a software product line. We illustrate the individual steps by a real-world example from an industrial production environment.

Problems addressed:
Challenges of legacy heterogeneous software landscapes in production systems

Practice‑oriented identification of commonalities and variabilities as basis for extracting a software product line.

Talk language: English
Level: Newcomer
Target group: Software Architects, Software Project Manager

Company:
Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH

Dr. Katharina Juhnke

Prof. Dr. Matthias Tichy