Analysing Feature Model Changes using FMDiff

Evolving a large scale, highly variable systems is a challenging task. For such a system, evolution operations often require to update consistently both their implementation and its feature model. In this context, the evolution of the feature model closely follows the evolution of the system. The purpose of this work is to show that fine-grained...

Analysing Feature Model Changes using FMDiff

Evolving a large scale, highly variable sys- tems is a challenging task. For such a system, evolution operations often require to update consistently both their implementation and its feature model. In this con- text, the evolution of the feature model closely follows the evolution of the system. The purpose of this work is to show that fine...

Evaluating Feature Change Impact on Multi-Product Line Configurations Using Partial Information

Evolving large-scale, complex and highly variable systems is known to be a difficult task, where a single change can ripple through various parts of the system with potentially undesirable effects. In the case of product lines, and moreover multi-product lines, a change may affect only certain variants or certain combinations of features, making...

Extracting Feature Model Changes from the Linux Kernel Using FMDiff

The Linux kernel feature model has been studied as an example of large scale evolving feature model and yet details of its evolution are not known. We present here a classification of feature changes occurring on the Linux kernel feature model, as well as a tool, FMDiff, designed to automatically extract those changes. With this tool, we...

Detecting and refactoring code smells in spreadsheet formula

Preprint of article published in: Empirical Software Engineering, February 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York, doi:10.1007/s10664-013-9296-2 Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing understandability and maintainability...

Measuring Spreadsheet Formula Understandability

Spreadsheets are widely used in industry, because they are flexible and easy to use. Often they are used for business-critical applications. It is however difficult for spreadsheet users to correctly assess the quality of spreadsheets, especially with respect to the understandability. Understandability of spreadsheets is important, since...

Detecting Code Smells in Spreadsheet Formulas

Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing maintainability issues. This paper adapts known code smells to spreadsheet formulas. To that end we present a list of metrics by which we can detect smelly formulas and a visualization...

Collective Code Bookmarks for Program Comprehension

The program comprehension research community has been developing useful tools and techniques to support developers in the time-consuming activity of understanding software artifacts. However, the majority of the tools do not bring collective benefit to the team: After gaining the necessary understanding of an artifact (e.g., using a technique...

Adinda: A knowledgeable, browser-based IDE

In practice, many people have to work together to develop and maintain a software system. However, the programmer’s key tool, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is a solo-tool, serving to help individual programmers understand and modify the system. Such an IDE does not leverage the knowledge other team members may have of the design...

Supporting professional spreadsheet users by generating leveled dataflow diagrams

Thanks to their flexibility and intuitive programming model, spreadsheets are widely used in industry, often for businesscritical applications. Similar to software developers, professional spreadsheet users demand support for maintaining and transferring their spreadsheets. In this paper, we first study the problems and information needs of...

Combining micro-blogging and IDE interactions to support developers in their quests

Software engineers spend a considerable amount of time on program comprehension. Although vendors of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and analysis tools address this challenge, current support for storing and sharing program comprehension knowledge is limited. As a consequence, developers have to go through the time-consuming...

Domain-Specific Languages in Practice: A User Study on the Success Factors

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are languages in which the properties of a specific domain can be expressed. In this paper we present an empirical study on the use of a DSL in industry. This DSL encapsulates the details of services that communicate using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). From definitions of the data contracts between...