A large scale Linux-kernel based benchmark for feature location research
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Recovering traceability between features and code in product variants
Proceedings of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference
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Companies often develop and maintain a collection of product variants that share some common features but also support different, customer-specific features. To reengineering such legacy product variants for systematic reuse, one must identify features and their implementing code units (e.g. functions, files) in different product variants. Information retrieval (IR) techniques may be applied for that purpose. In this paper, we discuss problems that hinder direct application of IR techniques to a collection of product variants. To counter these problems, we present an approach to support effective feature location in product variants. The novelty of our approach is that we exploit commonalities and differences of product variants by software differencing and FCA techniques so that IR technique can achieve satisfactory results for feature location in product variants. We have implemented our approach and conducted evaluation with a collection of nine Linux kernel product variants. Our evaluation shows that our approach always significantly outperforms a direct application of IR technique in the subject product variants.