Segregating feature interfaces to support software product line maintenance

Cafeo, Bruno and Hunsen, Claus and Garcia, Alessandro and Apel, Sven and Lee, Jaejoon (2016) Segregating feature interfaces to support software product line maintenance. In: MODULARITY 2016 Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Modularity :. ACM, ESP, pp. 1-12. ISBN 9781450339957

[thumbnail of Modularity_2016-CR review]
Preview
PDF (Modularity_2016-CR review)
Modularity_2016_CR_review.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

Download (922kB)

Abstract

Although software product lines are widely used in practice, their maintenance is challenging. Features as units of behaviour can be heavily scattered across the source code of a product line, hindering modular reasoning. To alleviate this problem, feature interfaces aim at enhancing modular reasoning about features. However, considering all members of a feature interface is cumbersome, especially due to the large number of members arising in practice. To address this problem, we present an approach to group members of a feature interface. We argue that often only a subset of all interface members is relevant to a single maintenance task. Therefore, we propose a graph representation that is able to capture the collaboration between members and apply a clustering algorithm to it to group highly-related members and segregate non-related members. On a set of ten versions of a real-world product line, we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, by comparing the two types of feature interfaces (segregated vs. original interfaces) with co-change information from the version-control system. We found a potential reduction of 62% of the interface members to be considered in a single maintenance task. This way, the effort to reason about features can be reduced.

Item Type:
Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings
Additional Information:
© ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in MODULARITY 2016 Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Modularity, 2016 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2889443.2889451
Subjects:
?? software product linesfeature interfacefeature dependencies ??
ID Code:
78082
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
01 Feb 2016 10:04
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
18 Dec 2023 02:16