Feature location benchmark with argoUML SPL

Abstract

Feature location is a traceability recovery activity to identify the implementation elements associated to a characteristic of a system. Besides its relevance for software maintenance of a single system, feature location in a collection of systems received a lot of attention as a first step to re-engineer system variants (created through clone-and-own) into a Software Product Line (SPL). In this context, the objective is to unambiguously identify the boundaries of a feature inside a family of systems to later create reusable assets from these implementation elements. Among all the case studies in the SPL literature, variants derived from ArgoUML SPL stands out as the most used one. However, the use of different settings, or the omission of relevant information (e.g., the exact configurations of the variants or the way the metrics are calculated), makes it difficult to reproduce or benchmark the different feature location techniques even if the same ArgoUML SPL is used. With the objective to foster the research area on feature location, we provide a set of common scenarios using ArgoUML SPL and a set of utils to obtain metrics based on the results of existing and novel feature location techniques.

Identifying and Visualizing Variability in Object-Oriented Variability-Rich Systems

“…We added JUnit 4, as its architecture is based on many design patterns, at least in its previous version 3, and the Java-backend of JHispter, an application generator for web applications and microservices, as it has been already used as a variability case study [23]. Similarly, we also selected ArgoUML, a UML diagramming application, used in different studies on SPL engineering [40].…”

Mapping features to automatically identified object-oriented variability implementations

“…In the software product line community it is used as a realistic case study for demonstrating the basic challenges for refactoring a single code base system with variability into an SPL [8]. The extracted ArgoUML-SPL, with its ground truth, was also recently proposed [22] and used [9,23] as a benchmark for evaluating the feature location techniques. The considered ArgoUML-SPL ground truth [22] consists of a feature model (FM) and traces of its optional features to the annotated reusable code assets.…”

“…The extracted ArgoUML-SPL, with its ground truth, was also recently proposed [22] and used [9,23] as a benchmark for evaluating the feature location techniques. The considered ArgoUML-SPL ground truth [22] consists of a feature model (FM) and traces of its optional features to the annotated reusable code assets.…”

“…The ArgoUML-SPL benchmark provides a ground truth of traces for the 8 optional features to their respective conditional compilations in code assets. These traces appear as links of a given feature to a complete class, class refinement (i.e., referencing statements within a single class), complete method, or method refinement (i.e., referencing statements within a single method) [22] 4 . The benchmark distinguishes the traces of the 8 individual optional features, their 14 feature combinations, with two and three features, and 2 negated individual features.…”

“…The ArgoUML-SPL [8] itself is an SPL created on top of its code by using annotations for conditional compilation to directly delimit feature code. This SPL has already been used by the community as a case study and we take for our study its ground truth [22], which contains a set of trace links for its domain features obtained by analysing these annotations (Section 2). We run symfinder on the source code of the ArgoUML-SPL to automatically extract vp-s with variants.…”