Feature modeling is a popular Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) technique used to describe variability in a product family. A usable feature modeling tool environment should enable SPLE practitioners to produce good quality models, in particular, models that effectively communicate modeled information. FAMILIAR is a text-based environment for manipulating and composing Feature Models (FMs). In this paper we present extensions we made to FAMILIAR to enhance its usability. The extensions include a visualization of FMs, or more precisely, a feature diagram rendering mechanism that supports the use of a combination of text and graphics to describe FMs, their configurations, and the results of FM analyses. We also present the results of a preliminary evaluation of the environment’s usability. The evaluation involves comparing the use of the extended environment with the previous text-based console-driven version. The preliminary experiment provides some evidence that use of the new environment results in increased cognitive effectiveness of novice users and improved quality of new FMs.
CITATION STYLE
Jaksic, A., France, R. B., Collet, P., & Ghosh, S. (2014). Evaluating the usability of a visual feature modeling notation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 8706, 122–140. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11245-9_7
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