Experimenting with the Comprehension of Feature-Oriented and UML-Based Core Assets

Software product line engineering mainly deals with specifying and developing core assets that can be utilized and adapted into specific product artifacts. Feature-oriented and UML-based modeling methods have been proposed for managing and supporting core assets specification. While these methods get a lot of attention in software product line engineering literature, their comparison in terms of comprehension is somewhat neglected. Being suitable for early stages of core assets development, this work aims at performing comparative analysis and discussing their advantages and limitations in view of two main stakeholders: developers and product customers. To this end, we conducted two experiments for examining the comprehension of core assets specification in feature-oriented CBFM and UML-based ADOM. The results showed that the only significant difference in terms of comprehension between these methods is in variability specification; developers may better understand the locations at which variability occurs and the ways to realize variability in ADOM.

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