Résumé
Usually, companies meet different customer needs in a particular domain by developing variants of a software product. This is often performed by ad-hoc copying and modifying of various existing variants to fit purposes of new one. As the number of product variants grows, such an ad-hoc development causes severe problems to maintain these variants. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) can be helpful here by supporting a large-scale reuse in a systematic way. SPL architecture (SPLA) is a key asset as it is used to derive architecture for each product in SPL. Unfortunately, developing SPLA from scratch is a costly task. In this paper, we propose an approach to contribute for recovering SPLA from existing product variants. This contribution is two-fold. Firstly, identifying common features and variation points of features of a given collection of product variants. Secondly, exploiting commonality and variability in terms of features to identify mandatory components and variation points of components as an important step in this recovering process. To validate the proposed approach, we applied it to two case studies. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of our approach.