Feature Identification: A Novel Approach and a Case Study

  • Authors:

  • Giuliano Antoniol;Yann-Gael Gueheneuc

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Sannio and École Polytechnique de Montréal;École Polytechnique de Montréal

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '05 Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Feature identification is a well-known technique to identify subsets of a program source code activated when exercising a functionality. Several approaches have been proposed to identify features. We present an approach to feature identification and comparison for large object-oriented multi-threaded programs using both static and dynamic data. We use processor emulation, knowledge filtering, and probabilistic ranking to overcome the difficulties of collecting dynamic data, i.e., imprecision and noise. We use model transformations to compare and to visualise identified features. We compare our approach with a naive approach and a concept analysis-based approach using a case study on a real-life large object-oriented multi-threaded program, Mozilla, to show the advantages of our approach. We also use the case study to compare processor emulation with statistical profiling.