Visualizing Software Product Line Variabilities in Source Code

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (C. Kästner, S. Trujillo, S. Apel)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Christian Kästner, Salvador Trujillo, and Sven Apel. Visualizing Software Product Line Variabilities in Source Code. In Proceedings of the 2nd International SPLC Workshop on Visualisation in Software Product Line Engineering (ViSPLE), ISBN 978-1-905952-06-9, pages 303--313, September 2008.

Implementing software product lines is a challenging task. Depending on the implementation technique the code that realizes a feature is often scattered across multiple code units. This way it becomes difficult to trace features in source code which hinders maintenance and evolution. While previous effort on visualization technologies in software product lines has focused mainly on the feature model, we suggest tool support for feature traceability in the code base. With our tool CIDE, we propose an approach based on filters and views on source code in order to visualize and trace features in source code.