Detecting commonality and variability in use-case diagram variants

Abstract: The use-case diagram is a software artifact. Thus, as with any software artifact, the use-case diagrams change across time through the software development life cycle. Therefore, several versions of the same diagram are existed at distinct times. Thus, comparing all use-case diagram variants to detect common and variable use-cases becomes one of the main challenges in the product line reengineering field. The contribution of this paper is to suggest an automatic approach to compare a collection of use-case diagram variants and detect both commonality and variability. In our work, every use-case represents a feature. The proposed approach visualizes the detected features using formal concept analysis, where common and variable features are introduced to software engineers. The proposed approach was applied on a mobile media case study to be validated. The findings confirm the importance and the performance of the suggested approach as all common and variable features were precisely detected via formal concept analysis and latent semantic indexing.