Towards Visualization of Feature Interactions in Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of related systems whose members are distinguished by the set of features they provide. To effectively evolve and maintain SPLs it is vital to understand how features are implemented and how they interact at different levels from source code to runtime. However the large number of features and the complex nature of interactions in typical SPLs make maintenance and evolution tasks challenging, and demand robust tool support for the software engineers to carry out these tasks. In this paper we present the first results of our ongoing work to address this need. We put forward four visualizations that focus on features and their interactions at source code level, evaluate them with four case studies, and sketch our future work.