Segregating Feature Interfaces to Support Software Product Line Maintenance
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 often 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 based on their mutual dependencies. We argue that often only a subset of all interface members is relevant to a 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 during maintenance. This way, the effort to reason about features can be reduced.
Wed 16 MarDisplayed time zone: Belfast change
10:30 - 12:30 | Modular Design and ReasoningResearch Results at MODULARITY Chair(s): Hridesh Rajan Iowa State University | ||
10:30 30mTalk | Segregating Feature Interfaces to Support Software Product Line Maintenance Research Results Bruno B. P. Cafeo PUC-Rio, Brazil, Claus Hunsen University of Passau, Germany, Alessandro Garcia PUC-Rio, Brazil, Sven Apel University of Passau, Jaejoon Lee Lancaster University, UK DOI | ||
11:00 30mTalk | Reasoning Tradeoffs in Languages with Enhanced Modularity Features Research Results DOI | ||
11:30 30mTalk | Unveiling and Reasoning about Co-change Dependencies Research Results Marcos César de Oliveira MPOG, Brazil, Rodrigo Bonifácio University of Brasília, Brazil, Guilherme N. Ramos University of Brasília, Brazil, Márcio Ribeiro Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL) DOI | ||
12:00 30mTalk | The Expression Problem, Trivially! Research Results DOI |