A Common Notation and Tool Support for Embedded Feature Annotations

Abstract

Features are typically used to describe the functionalities of software systems. They help understanding systems as well as planning their evolution and managing systems. Especially agile methods foster their use. However, to use features, their locations need to be known. When not documented, they are easily forgotten and then need to be recovered, which is costly. While automated featurelocation techniques exist, they are not usable in practice given their inaccuracies. We take a different route and advocate to record locations early using a lightweight annotation system, where feature information is embedded in software assets. However, given the potential design space of annotations, a unified notation and tool support is needed. Extending our prior work, we present a unified, concise notation for embedded annotations, which we implemented in FAXE, a library for parsing and retrieving such annotations, useable in third-party tooling. We demonstrate its use, especially for an advanced use case of feature-oriented isolated development by automating partial commits. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software product lines; Traceability.

Visualization of object-oriented software in a city metaphor: Comprehending the implemented variability and its technical debt

“…FeatureDashboard [139] is an Eclipse plugin that allows visualizing known mappings between features and code assets as well feature annotations in a codebase. This approach has been extended with a notation for embedded feature annotation and the FAXE (Feature Annotation eXtraction Engine) [140] tool to process such annotations. HAnS [141] is an IntelliJ plugin to assist the management and edition of feature annotations in code assets.…”

Seamless Variability Management with the Virtual Platform

“…To increase developer trust and optimize accuracy, an important challenge is to keep the "human in the loop", which we aim to address by exploring dedicated user interfaces. By integrating the virtual platform with available annotation systems [88], we could facilitate inspection of the available feature mappings. Offering a "preview mode" would allow to inspect and interact with the changes arising from a planned operator invocation.…”

Properties of a Feature in Code-Assets: An Exploratory Study

“…Tracing features in the code-assets is one of the common activities in software product line engineering [19] and tools [20]- [23] were developed to facilitate the activity. Nonetheless, less attention was paid to the actual properties of features that have the potential to affect the modifiability of the code-asset.…”