An industrial experience of using reference architectures for mapping features to code

Context

Software Product Lines (SPLs) constitute a popular method for encouraging the methodical reuse of software artefacts. Just like any other piece of software, SPLs require management throughout their evolution, namely to preserve the consistency between requirements and the code.

Problem

Over time, for a given SPL, many change requests are made and all of them need to be integrated in a consistent and coordinated way. The evolution of an SPL is facilitated if there exist links between its artefacts, namely between each feature and its respective pieces of implementation code.

Method

This paper proposes FMap, a systematic feature mapping approach to be used within SPLs. FMap traces a Feature Model (FM) to other artefacts of an SPL, the reference architecture, and the code, and it establishes connections between each feature of the FM and its locations in the code-base. Additionally, we have created a tool called friendlyMapper to provide some automatic support for the approach. Using two case studies from two different companies, FMap and friendlyMapper are evaluated.

Results

The evaluation of the case studies indicates that the FMap approach outperforms the baseline approach (i.e., the branching approach).

Contribution

This work contributes with FMap, a novel tool-based approach that supports feature-architecture-code mappings based on reference architecture. FMap assists software engineers in adapting the evolution of the SPLs to accommodate new features and change requests as the SPLs evolve. The case studies for both companies demonstrate that the approach is applicable to real-world products and is able to support feature traceability and maintain consistency among features, architecture, and code.