Feature-centric Environment

The task of locating the parts of the code that are relevant to a feature in object-oriented systems is widely recognized as a non-trivial task and a body of reverse engineering research collectively referred to as feature identification has emerged. The main focus of feature identification research to date is in a reverse engineering context. Despite the fact that research has highlighted the usefulness of feature identification techniques for program comprehension, very little of this effort has found its way into the software engineer's development environment. In this paper, we demonstrate a tool providing a perspective of a system that reflects how features are implemented to support maintenance activities. By integrating this tool in a development environment we support feature understanding while performing maintenance activities. This environment, called feature-centric environment, compares several features visually, provides a detailed view for a single feature and integrates a code browser focusing on a single feature of a software system. All these different views are enriched with metrics, they are interconnected and the user is able to interact with them. We introduce the feature-centric environment and its different views.