Variability Mining: Consistent Semi-automatic Detection of Product-Line Features

Kästner, Christian; Dreiling, Alexander; Ostermann, Klaus

doi:10.1109/tse.2013.45

Cited by 78 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Hence, the tool should (b) support recording the source code associated with the feature and (c) make explicit source code one structural dependency away from this source code. This iterative-refinement approach is in line with the evaluation literature on Feature Location Techniques (FLTs), which suggests that existing, fully-automated techniques are inappropriate when seeking the full location of a feature in the code-base [9], as they have low effectiveness, in terms of their recall [1]. Consequently, (d) any automated FLTs brought in to support the engineers in their feature location with the tool should augment this interactive, iterative refinement and not replace it.…”

Section: Figure 1: a Conceptual Representation Of The Feature Locatiosupporting

confidence: 53%

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Rosik

Herold

et al. 2016

Proccedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops

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Reflexion Modeling has been proposed as a means of creating and refining a functional model of software systems at the architectural level. Such a model allows developers to maintain a consistent understanding of the relationships between different functionalities of their system as it evolves, and allows them to analyze the system at a functional-chunk level rather than at the traditional, structural levels more typically presented by IDEs. This paper describes a prototype tool built to enable this approach. The tool assists developers in moving to this functional perspective by supporting them as they first attempt to locate specific functionalities in the code. This support is based on design principles identified by observing experienced software developers in-vivo, as they performed this task manually. After the code associated with several such functionalities is located in the code-base, a graphical view allows the developer to assess the source code dependencies between these features and between these features and the rest of the system. This helps the developer understand the inter-functional interfaces, and the representation can be reviewed over time, as features are added and removed, to ensure on-going consistency between the architect's perspective of the features in the system and the code-base.

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Section: Figure 1: a Conceptual Representation Of The Feature Locatiosupporting

confidence: 53%

Flints

Buckley

Rosik

Herold

et al. 2016

Proccedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops

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“…Such an environment would be in the spirit of FEAT [68] where the level of visualization would be increased from Feature contents, as in FEAT, to feature contents and inter-feature dependencies. The participants' comments hinted at the requirement for a Feature Location Technique as part of this environment and an iterative process for this is envisaged, in line with the process proposed by Kastner et al [69]. In this process users would seed the tool with elements of the source code they associate with the feature and the tool would iteratively apply Feature Location Techniques to that seed set.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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ContextReflexion Modelling is considered one of the more successful approaches to architecture reconciliation. Empirical studies strongly suggest that professional developers involved in real-life industrial projects find the information provided by variants of this approach useful and insightful, but the degree to which it resolves architecture conformance issues is still unclear. ObjectiveThis paper aims to assess the level of architecture conformance achieved by professional architects using Reflexion Modelling, and to determine how the approach could be extended to improve its suitability for this task. MethodAn in-vivo, multi-case-study protocol was adopted across five software systems, from four different financial services organizations. Think-aloud, video-tape and interview data from professional architects involved in Reflexion Modelling sessions were analysed qualitatively. ResultsThis study showed that (at least) four months after the Reflexion Modelling sessions less than 50% of the architectural violations identified were removed. The majority of participants who did remove violations favoured changes to the architectural model rather than to the code. Participants seemed to work off two specific architectural templates, and interactively explored their architectural model to focus in on the causes of violations, and to assess the ramifications of potential code changes. They expressed a desire for dependency analysis beyond static-source-code analysis and scalable visualizations. ConclusionThe findings support several interesting usage-in-practice traits, previously hinted at in the literature. These include 1) the iterative analysis of systems through Reflexion models, as a precursor to possible code change or as a focusing mechanism to identify the location of architecture conformance issues, 2) the extension of the approach with respect to dependency analysis of software systems and architectural modelling templates, 3) improved visualization support and 4) the insight that identification of architectural violations in itself does not lead to their removal in the majority of instances.

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“…Overall, our empirical study shows that, given a supervised and necessary scoping (selection of products), the synthesized PCMs exhibit numerous quantitative and comparable information: 12.5% of quantified features, 15.6% of descriptive features, and only 13.0% of empty cells. The user study shows that our automatic approach retrieve 43% of correct features and 68% of correct cell values in one step and without any user intervention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Numerous techniques have been developed to mine variability [10,15,16] and support domain analysis [17,18,19,20,7,6,3,21,22,23], but none of them address the problem of structuring the information in a PCM.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated extraction of product comparison matrices from informal product descriptions

Nasr

Bécan

Acher

et al. 2017

Journal of Systems and Software

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Domain analysts, product managers, or customers aim to capture the important features and differences among a set of related products. A case-by-case reviewing of each product description is a laborious and time-consuming task that fails to deliver a condense view of a family of product.In this article, we investigate the use of automated techniques for synthesizing a product comparison matrix (PCM) from a set of product descriptions written in natural language. We describe a tool-supported process, based on term recognition, information extraction, clustering, and similarities, capable of identifying and organizing features and values in a PCM -despite the informality and absence of structure in the textual descriptions of products.We evaluate our proposal against numerous categories of products mined from BestBuy. Our empirical results show that the synthesized PCMs exhibit numerous quantitative, comparable information that can potentially complement or even refine technical descriptions of products. The user study shows that our automatic approach is capable of extracting a significant portion of correct features and correct values. This approach has been implemented in MatrixMiner a web environment with an interactive support for automatically synthesizing PCMs from informal product descriptions. MatrixMiner also maintains traceability with the original descriptions and the technical specifications for further refinement or maintenance by users.

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Variability Mining: Consistent Semi-automatic Detection of Product-Line Features

Cited by 78 publications

References 58 publications

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Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Automated extraction of product comparison matrices from informal product descriptions

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