A Hybrid Feature Location Technique for Re-engineeringSingle Systems into Software Product Lines

Michelon, Gabriela Karoline; Linsbauer, Lukas; Assunção, Wesley K. G.; Fischer, Stefan; Egyed, Alexander

doi:10.1145/3442391.3442403

Cited by 16 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…To add another type of chart in the library, she will need to implement a new variant of this vp and needs thus to have an overview of the classes used by these subclasses. To do so, the user adds the two most variable ones (XYPlot 15 and CategoryPlot 16 ) as entry points (Fig. 6b).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The implemented variability in code assets is neither explicit nor documented, which hinders its management, but more basically, hampers the simple comprehension of it. As features to be understood are not known in advance, and the code is not cloned and modified per product, none of the feature location techniques [13]- [15] can be applied in this context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Visualization of Object-Oriented Variability Implementations as Cities

Mortara¹,

Collet²,

Dery³

2021

Preprint

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Many large software systems are variability-rich, object-oriented, and implemented in a single code base. They then rely on multiple traditional techniques (inheritance, patterns) to realize variability, making these implementations not explicit. This directly hampers the comprehension of variability implementations, especially for newcomers in a project that need, in a short time, to understand the most important parts. In this paper, we propose VariCity, a visualization using the city metaphor to exhibit zones of interest, being zones of high density of variability implementations. The different forms of variability implementations are first detected through the usage of symmetries in code (e.g., inheritance defines a substitution symmetry between the immutable part of the superclass and the possible changes in its subclasses). VariCity then creates a 3D city representation with buildings being classes while the metrics on the number of symmetries (e.g., the number of overloaded methods, influence the building size, and their color if they are heavily loaded in symmetries). Contrary to the usual packagebased organization in code-related city representations, the city streets are arranged according to the usage relationships between classes. Inheritance is simply represented with hoverable aerial links. Variability-related design patterns are depicted as buildings with specific geometric forms, while some classes specified as entry points can help in shaping the whole city organization. We also report on the evaluation of VariCity on a set of large objectoriented systems, showing that several usage scenarios helping a newcomer to spot critical variability-related zones are covered.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization of Object-Oriented Variability Implementations as Cities

Mortara¹,

Collet²,

Dery³

2021

Preprint

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“…Exercising the features. We reused execution traces from Michelon et al [15]. These traces were made publicly available 2 in files with data about the lines of code that were executed per feature.…”

Section: Study Design and Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ArgoUML SPL benchmark [12] was proposed for comparable results in FL for families of systems. The use of benchmarks in the SPL research field has been acknowledged as an important direction to advance the state of the art [22] and, for this specific benchmark, static FL techniques have been proposed to locate features in sets of variants [6,14,16,17] as well as a hybrid approach [15]. The benchmark [12] provides a feature location ground-truth for eight features within the ArgoUML Java source code based on the source code annotations of a manual extraction [5] using the original Ar-goUML.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this work, we focus on dynamic FL and we explore the usage of Spectrum-based localization [24]. Similar to the mentioned hybrid approach [15], we consider only the original scenario, i.e., the single system of the original ArgoUML, aiming to contribute to the state of the art of FL for re-engineering single systems into SPLs. Therefore, our contributions are: (i) a dynamic FL approach using Spectrumbased FL, and (ii) a comparison and discussion of our approach with the previous ones: hybrid [15] and static [14], for the ArgoUML SPL Benchmark [12].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spectrum-based feature localization

Michelon

Sotto-Mayor

Martínez

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A

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Feature localization (FL) is a basic activity in re-engineering legacy systems into software product lines. In this work, we explore the use of the Spectrum-based localization technique for this task. This technique is traditionally used for fault localization but with practical applications in other tasks like the dynamic FL approach that we propose. The ArgoUML SPL benchmark is used as a case study and we compare it with a previous hybrid (static and dynamic) approach from which we reuse the manual and testing execution traces of the features. We conclude that it is feasible and sound to use the Spectrum-based approach providing promising results in the benchmark metrics. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software reverse engineering; Software product lines.

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