Visualizing Feature-Level Evolution in Product Lines: A Research Preview

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Software product lines evolve frequently to address customer requirements in different domains. This leads to a distributed engineering process with frequent updates and extensions. [Question/problem] However, such changes are typically managed and tracked at the level of source code while feature-level awareness about software evolution is commonly lacking. In this research preview paper we thus present an approach visualizing the evolution in software product lines at the level of features. [Principal ideas/results] Specifically, we extend feature models with feature evolution plots to visualize changes at a higher level. Our approach uses static code analyses and a variation control system to compute the evolution data for visualisation. As a preliminary evaluation we report selected examples of applying our approach to a cyberphysical ecosystem from the field of industrial automation. [Contribution] Integrating visualisations into state-of-the-art feature models can contribute to better integrate requirements-level and code-level perspectives during product line evolution.