Integrating legacy documentation assets into a product line

When introducing software product-line engineering into an organization, there normally exist systems that have already been developed in the domain of the product line. There are legacy assets in different forms which should be integrated into the product line. In this paper, we describe the role of legacy documents in the product-line engineering life-cycle, and especially for domain analysis. We propose some basic techniques for eliciting knowledge that is relevant to the product line and can increase domain understanding. Those techniques can be used for the elicitation of commonalities and variabilities from legacy documentations and can produce candidates for elements of a domain model which can then be proposed to the domain experts during domain analysis.