Visual Support for Understanding Product Lines

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (J. Feigenspan, C. Kästner, M. Frisch, R. Dachselt, S. Apel)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Janet Feigenspan, Christian Kästner, Mathias Frisch, Raimund Dachselt, and Sven Apel. Visual Support for Understanding Product Lines. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), ISBN 978-1-4244-7604-6, pages 34--35, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, 2010. Demonstration paper.

The C preprocessor is often used in practice to implement variability in software product lines. Using #ifdef statements provokes problems such as obfuscated source code, yet they will still be used in practice at least in the medium-term future. With CIDE, we demonstrate a tool to improve understanding and maintaining code that contains #ifdef statements by visualizing them with colors and providing different views on the code.