Managing Systems Evolving in Space and Time: Four Challenges for Maintenance, Evolution and Composition of Variants
Gabriela Karoline Michelon, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
David Obermann, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Wesley K. G. Assunção, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Lukas Linsbauer, Universität Braunschweig, Germany
Paul Grünbacher, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Alexander Egyed, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Software companies need to provide a large set of features satisfying
functional and non-functional requirements of diverse customers,
thereby leading to variability in space. Feature location techniques
have been proposed to support software maintenance and evolution
in space. However, so far only one feature location technique also
analyses the evolution in time of system variants, which is required
for feature enhancements and bug fixing. Specifically, existing tools
for managing a set of systems over time do not offer proper support
for keeping track of feature revisions, updating existing variants,
and creating new product configurations based on feature revisions.
This paper presents four challenges concerning such capabilities
for feature (revision) location and composition of new product
configurations based on feature/s (revisions). We also provide a
benchmark containing a ground truth and support for computing
metrics. We hope that this will motivate researchers to provide and
evaluate tool-supported approaches aiming at managing systems
evolving in space and time. Further, we do not limit the evaluation
of techniques to only this benchmark: we introduce and provide
instructions on how to use a benchmark extractor for generating
ground truth data for other systems. We expect that the feature
(revision) location techniques maximize information retrieval in
terms of precision, recall, and F-score, while keeping execution
time and memory consumption low.