KernelHaven -- An Open Infrastructure for Product Line Analysis

Abstract: KernelHaven is an open infrastructure for Software Product Line (SPL) analysis. It is intended both as a production-quality analysis tool set as well as a research support tool, e.g., to support researchers in systematically exploring research hypothesis. For flexibility and ease of experimentation KernelHaven components are plug-ins for extracting certain information from SPL artifacts and processing this information, e.g., to check the correctness and consistency of variability information or to apply metrics. A configuration-based setup along with automatic documentation functionality allows different experiments and supports their easy reproduction. Here, we describe KernelHaven as a product line analysis research tool and highlight its basic approach as well as its fundamental capabilities. In particular, we describe available information extraction and processing plug-ins and how to combine them. On this basis, researchers and interested professional users can rapidly conduct a first set of experiments. Further, we describe the concepts for extending KernelHaven by new plug-ins, which reduces development effort when realizing new experiments.