Feature-Level Change Impact Analysis Using Formal Concept Analysis

Hamzeh Eyal-Salman (1) , Abdelhak-Djamel Seriai (2) , Christophe Dony (2)

1 LIRMM - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier
2 MAREL - Models And Reuse Engineering, Languages

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a system- atic reuse approach to develop a short time-to-market and quality products, called Software Product Line (SPL). Usu- ally, the SPL is not developed from scratch but it is devel- oped by reusing features (resp. their source code elements) of existing similar systems developed by ad-hoc reuse tech- niques. The feature implementations may be changed for adapting SPLE context. The change may impact other fea- tures that are not interested in the change, as a feature’s implementation spans multiple code elements and shares code elements with other features. Therefore, feature-level Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is needed to predict affected features for change management purpose. In this paper, we propose a feature-level CIA technique using formal concept analysis. In our experimental evaluation using three case studies of different domains and sizes, we show the effec- tiveness of our technique in terms of the most commonly used metrics on the subject.

Mots clés: FCA; Software product line; Product variants; Feature; Source code; Impact analysis

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Hamzeh Eyal-Salman, Abdelhak-Djamel Seriai, Christophe Dony. Feature-Level Change Impact Analysis Using Formal Concept Analysis. SEKE: Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Jul 2014, Vancouver, Canada. pp.447-452. ⟨lirmm-01291179⟩