一句话：提出在开发过程中半自动记录特征踪迹的方法，减少手动标注并支持 clone-and-own 变体管理。
论文关注多变体软件开发中需求到实现的特征踪迹难以维护的问题。在软件产品线中特征踪迹通常被完整记录，但实践中 clone-and-own 仍占主导，事后迁移因踪迹知识分散或丢失而成本高昂。作者提出一种半自动的特征踪迹记录方法，在开发过程中、领域知识尚可用时主动记录踪迹，并面向已有和新源代码缺乏领域知识的情形。该方法通过回放代码编辑模式来支持踪迹记录。作者在两个真实产品线的历史编辑模式上进行评估，表明该方法能减少手动指定踪迹的工作量，并有望改进克隆变体间的变更传播自动化，降低迁移到产品线的成本。
Tracing requirements to their implementation is crucial to all stakeholders of a software development process. When managing software variability, requirements are typically expressed in terms of features, a feature being a user-visible characteristic of the software. While feature traces are fully documented in software product lines, ad-hoc branching and forking, known as clone-and-own, is still the dominant way for developing multi-variant software systems in practice. Retroactive migration to product lines suffers from uncertainties and high effort because knowledge of feature traces must be recovered but is scattered across teams or even lost. We propose a semi-automated methodology for recording feature traces proactively, during software development when the necessary knowledge is present. To support the ongoing development of previously unmanaged clone-and-own projects, we explicitly deal with the absence of domain knowledge for both existing and new source code. We evaluate feature trace recording by replaying code edit patterns from the history of two real-world product lines. Our results show that feature trace recording reduces the manual effort to specify traces. Recorded feature traces could improve automation in change-propagation among cloned system variants and could reduce effort if developers decide to migrate to a product line.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot6381,
title = {Feature trace recording},
author = {Paul Maximilian Bittner and Alexander Schultheiß and Thomas Thüm and Timo Kehrer and Jeffrey M. Young and Lukas Linsbauer},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1145/3468264.3468531}
}