Aspects influencing feature-oriented software comprehension: observations from a focus group

Feature-oriented software development has been considered as a reasonable way to address the ever increasing need of handling variability in software systems. However, we still lack to understand the influence of the use of different ways to implement variability on program comprehension and consequently on the effort they demand from developers, so they could successfully accomplish the assigned maintenance tasks. This paper addresses it presenting a qualitative study carried out as an focus group aimed at identify factors influencing program comprehension. The findings of our study were grouped into four groups, including the followed strategies to understand feature-oriented software, the factors hindering and easing such understanding, as well as general observations on the effort demanded to maintain software either using C onditional C ompilation or F eature H ouse .