Mapping Features to Automatically Identified Object-Oriented Variability Implementations - The case of ArgoUML-SPL

Johann Mortara (1, 2, 3) , Xhevahire Tërnava (4) , Philippe Collet (1, 2, 3)

1 I3S - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis
2 Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS - Scalable and Pervasive softwARe and Knowledge Systems
3 COMUE UCA - COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019)
4 MoVe - Modélisation et Vérification

In Software Product Line (SPL) engineering, mapping domain features to existing code assets is essential for variability management. When variability is already implemented through Object-Oriented (OO) techniques, it is too costly and error-prone to refactor assets in terms of features or to use feature annotations. In this work, we delve into the possible usage of automatically identified variation points with variants in an OO code base to enable feature mapping from the domain level. We report on an experiment conducted over ArgoUML-SPL, using its code as input for automatic detection through the symfinder toolchain, and the previously devised domain features as a ground truth. We analyse the relevance of the identified variation points with variants w.r.t. domain features, adapting precision and recall measures. This shows that the approach is feasible, that an automatic mapping can be envisaged, and also that the symfinder visualization is adapted to this process with some slight additions.

Mots clés: Variability traceability; Automatic identification of variation points; Understanding software variability; Software product lines

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Johann Mortara, Xhevahire Tërnava, Philippe Collet. Mapping Features to Automatically Identified Object-Oriented Variability Implementations - The case of ArgoUML-SPL. 14th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMoS ’20), Feb 2020, Magdeburg, Germany. ⟨10.1145/3377024.3377037⟩. ⟨hal-02421353⟩