research-article

Feature cohesion in software product lines: an exploratory study

Authors:

Dirk BeyerAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 421 - 430

https://doi.org/10.1145/1985793.1985851

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Software product lines gain momentum in research and industry. Many product-line approaches use features as a central abstraction mechanism. Feature-oriented software development aims at encapsulating features in cohesive units to support program comprehension, variability, and reuse. Surprisingly, not much is known about the characteristics of cohesion in feature-oriented product lines, although proper cohesion is of special interest in product-line engineering due to its focus on variability and reuse. To fill this gap, we conduct an exploratory study on forty software product lines of different sizes and domains. A distinguishing property of our approach is that we use both classic software measures and novel measures that are based on distances in clustering layouts, which can be used also for visual exploration of product-line architectures. This way, we can draw a holistic picture of feature cohesion. In our exploratory study, we found several interesting correlations (e.g., between development process and feature cohesion) and we discuss insights and perspectives of investigating feature cohesion (e.g., regarding feature interfaces and programming style).

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Index Terms

Feature cohesion in software product lines: an exploratory study
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Metrics
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Context specific languages
      1. Domain specific languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Software architectures

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2011

1258 pages

ISBN:9781450304450

DOI:10.1145/1985793

General Chair:
Richard N. Taylor
UC Irvine, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
,
Nenad Medvidović
University of Southern California, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 21 May 2011

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ICSE11

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SIGSOFT

ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 21 - 28, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639478.3640046
Toledo RAtlee JXiong R(2024)Visualizing Analysis Results for SPL Models - A User Study2024 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT64034.2024.00018(83-95)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT64034.2024.00018
Medeiros RMartinez JDíaz OFalleri J(2023)Visualizations for the evolution of Variant-Rich SystemsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107084154:COnline publication date: 20-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107084
Shahin RToledo RHackman RS RAtlee JChechik M(2023)Applying declarative analysis to industrial automotive software product line modelsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10290-228:2Online publication date: 4-Feb-2023
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