Can we refactor conditional compilation into aspects?

Adams, Bram; Meuter, Wolfgang De; Tromp, Herman; Hassan, Ahmed E.

doi:10.1145/1509239.1509274

Cited by 48 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…For example, developers might have used a clone-and-own approach or branches in a version control system, might have introduced variations with command-line parameters or #ifdef directives. In such scenario, other complementary migration and reengineering strategies are necessary [1], [21], [23], [35]. Here, we focus only on locating and extracting features from a single legacy-code base (not from deltas between branches).…”

Section: Variability Miningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1); during snapshot isolation's identification we can restrict the search space and exclude locking code. 1 Similarly, we can exploit implications between features (including parent-child relationships) to reduce the search space or to derive additional seeds. For example, before identifying the locking feature, we could have already identified a subfeature dynamicLocking (ability to disable locking at runtime; Lines 4 and 18 in Fig.…”

Section: Product-line Context and Design Goalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Now developers have to decide how to proceed. Developers may reject or accept a recommendation 1. In a legacy application that was not developed as a product line, mutually exclusive features are less common.…”

Section: Recommendation Mechanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kästner

Dreiling

Ostermann

2014

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Abstract-Software product line engineering is an efficient means to generate a set of tailored software products from a common implementation. However, adopting a product-line approach poses a major challenge and significant risks, since typically legacy code must be migrated toward a product line. Our aim is to lower the adoption barrier by providing semiautomatic tool support-called variability mining-to support developers in locating, documenting, and extracting implementations of product-line features from legacy code. Variability mining combines prior work on concern location, reverse engineering, and variability-aware type systems, but is tailored specifically for the use in product lines. Our work pursues three technical goals: (1) we provide a consistency indicator based on a variability-aware type system, (2) we mine features at a fine level of granularity, and (3) we exploit domain knowledge about the relationship between features when available. With a quantitative study, we demonstrate that variability mining can efficiently support developers in locating features.

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Section: Variability Miningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Product-line Context and Design Goalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kästner

Dreiling

Ostermann

2014

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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“…1 Lampiro is an instant-messaging client developed in Java ME and its features are implemented using #ifdefs. Figure 1 shows a code snippet extracted from Lampiro implemented in Java with the Antenna 2 preprocessor.…”

Section: Motivating Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Intraprocedural Dataflow Analysis for Software Product Lines

Brabrand¹,

Ribeiro²,

Tolêdo³

et al. 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Software product lines (SPLs) are commonly developed using annotative approaches such as conditional compilation that come with an inherent risk of constructing erroneous products. For this reason, it is essential to be able to analyze SPLs. However, as dataflow analysis techniques are not able to deal with SPLs, developers must generate and analyze all valid methods individually, which is expensive for non-trivial SPLs. In this paper, we demonstrate how to take any standard intraprocedural dataflow analysis and automatically turn it into a feature-sensitive dataflow analysis in three different ways. All are capable of analyzing all valid methods of an SPL without having to generate all of them explicitly. We have implemented all analyses as extensions of SOOT's intraprocedural dataflow analysis framework and experimentally evaluated their performance and memory characteristics on four qualitatively different SPLs. The results indicate that the feature-sensitive analyses are on average 5.6 times faster than the brute force approach on our SPLs, and that they have different time and space tradeoffs.

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“…Several researchers have even investigated automated refactorings (Adams et al, 2009;Kästner et al, 2009a). But preprocessors are still prevalent in practice and the vast amount of legacy code will not disappear soon.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do background colors improve program comprehension in the #ifdef hell?

et al. 2012

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Software-product-line engineering aims at the development of variable and reusable software systems. In practice, software product lines are often implemented with preprocessors. Preprocessor directives are easy to use, and many mature tools are available for practitioners. However, preprocessor directives have been heavily criticized in academia and even referred to as "#ifdef hell", because they introduce threats to program comprehension and correctness. There are many voices that suggest to use other implementation techniques instead, but these voices ignore the fact that a transition from preprocessors to other languages and tools is tedious, erroneous, and expensive in practice. Instead, we and others propose to increase the readability of preprocessor directives by using background colors to highlight source code annotated with ifdef directives. In three controlled experiments with over 70 subjects in total, we evaluate whether and how background colors improve program comprehension in preprocessor-based implementations. Our results demonstrate that background colors have the potential to improve program This is the authors' version and intended for personal use only. Any other use may violate the copyright. comprehension, independently of size and programming language of the underlying product. Additionally, we found that subjects generally favor background colors. We integrate these and other findings in a tool called FeatureCommander, which facilitates program comprehension in practice and which can serve as a basis for further research.

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Can we refactor conditional compilation into aspects?

Cited by 48 publications

References 37 publications

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

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

Intraprocedural Dataflow Analysis for Software Product Lines

Do background colors improve program comprehension in the #ifdef hell?

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