A Survey of Feature Location Techniques

Feature location techniques aim at locating software artifacts that implement a specific program functionality, a.k.a. a feature. These techniques support developers during various activities such as software maintenance, aspect- or feature-oriented refactoring, and others. For example, detecting artifacts that correspond to product line features can assist the transition from unstructured to systematic reuse approaches promoted by software product line engineering (SPLE). Managing features, as well as the traceability between these features and the artifacts that implement them, is an essential task of the SPLE domain engineering phase, during which the product line resources are specified, designed, and implemented. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing feature location techniques. We describe their implementation strategies and exemplify the techniques on a realistic use-case. We also discuss their properties, strengths, and weaknesses and provide guidelines that can be used by practitioners when deciding which feature location technique to choose. Our survey shows that none of the existing feature location techniques are designed to consider families of related products and only treat different products of a product line as individual, unrelated entities. We thus discuss possible directions for leveraging SPLE architectures in order to improve the feature location process.

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