On the proactive and interactive visualization for feature evolution comprehension: An industrial investigation

Abstract

Program comprehension is a key activity through maintenance and evolution of large-scale software systems. The understanding of a program often requires the evolution analysis of individual functionalities, so-called features. The comprehension of evolving features is not trivial as their implementations are often tangled and scattered through many modules. Even worse, existing techniques are limited in providing developers with direct means for visualizing the evolution of features' code. This work presents a proactive and interactive visualization strategy to enable feature evolution analysis. It proactively identifies code elements of evolving features and provides multiple views to present their structure under different perspectives. The novel visualization strategy was compared to a lightweight visualization strategy based on a tree-structure. We ran a controlled experiment with industry developers, who performed feature evolution comprehension tasks on an industrial-strength software. The results showed that the use of the proposed strategy presented significant gains in terms of correctness and execution time for feature evolution comprehension tasks.

SourceMiner Evolution: A Tool for Supporting Feature Evolution Comprehension

“…Even with the high accuracy of the expansion heuristics (80% to 100% [10] [11]), they may produce a few imperfections in mappings. However, we observed in our studies that these imperfections do not impact users' performance when performing a wide range of feature evolution tasks [12]. However, SME allows developers to manually confirm or reject the code elements mapped to a given feature using interaction mechanisms over the views (Section II.C).…”

“…The participants had to perform five comprehension tasks over five versions of a software system for the logistics of the oil industry [12]. None of the participants were familiar with this software system.…”

“…We evaluated the tool by comparing it against the ConcernMapper tool (CM) with respect to feature evolution comprehension tasks [12]. The tools were empirically compared with regard to task execution time and correctness.…”

Investigating factors that affect the human perception on god class detection: an analysis based on a family of four controlled experiments

“…In the same way, we defined the questions of the characterization form used in the analysis of the developer experience; and in the definition of the SourceMiner exercise, which trained the participants on the visualization tool. We mitigated this threat by adapting some of the material from works previously published in the literature (Schumacher et al 2010;Novais et al 2012) and discussing about them with other researchers from our research community.…”

Uma Análise do Uso da Ontologia IMS LD na Construção de Modelos Conceituais para E-learning

“…Foi considerada correta a tarefa que obteve o valor 1, parcialmente correta aquela que obteve um valor no intervalo ]0,1[, e incorreta para os casos de valor menor ou igual a 0. Os critérios foram definidos de acordo com [Novais et al 2012].…”