Using Tags to Support Feature Management Across Issue Tracking Systems and Version Control Systems - A Research Preview

Context & motivation: Features are important for many software engineering activities, e.g. release planning. Companies document features in Issue Tracking Systems (ITS) and store feature code in Version Control Systems (VCS). Question/Problem: However, companies do not always manage features systematically. This issue hinders e.g. the prioritizing of features for release planning. Principal ideas/results: We want to provide insights into practice regarding feature management. We have developed first ideas on lightweight feature management using tags. We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight experts to get insight into practice and an early evaluation of our idea. Contribution: The interviews showed that fuzzy feature descriptions, insufficient traceability, and fragmentation of feature knowledge are major practice problems. The interviews thus confirm the need for a method for managing features across ITS and VCS. We propose our lightweight method for feature management and describe future research regarding our approach.