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Software-product-line engineering aims at the development of variable and reusable software systems. In practice, software product lines are often implemented with preprocessors. Preprocessor directives are easy to use, and many mature tools are available for practitioners. However, preprocessor directives have been heavily criticized in academia and even referred to as “#ifdef hell”, because they...
Heterogeneity of embedded systems leads to the development of variable software, such as software product lines. From such a family of programs, stakeholders select the specific variant that satisfies their functional requirements. However, different functionality exposes different non-functional properties of these variants. Especially in the embedded-system domain, non-functional requirements are...
Programming experience is an important confounding parameter in controlled experiments regarding program comprehension. In literature, ways to measure or control programming experience vary. Often, researchers neglect it or do not specify how they controlled it. We set out to find a well-defined understanding of programming experience and a way to measure it. From published comprehension experiments,...
Software architectures can be presented by graphs with components as nodes and connectors as edges. These graphs, or models, typically encode expert domain knowledge, which makes them difficult to understand. Hence, instead of presenting a complete complex model, we can derive it from a simple, easy-to-understand model by a set of easy-to-understand transformations. In two controlled experiments,...
Experiments with human subjects become more and more important in software engineering. To support planning, conducting, and replicating experiments targeting program comprehension, we developed PROPHET. It allows experimenters to easily define and customize experimental settings as well as to export settings such that others can replicate their results. Furthermore, PROPHET provides extension points,...
Software measures are often used to assess program comprehension, although their applicability is discussed controversially. Often, their application is based on plausibility arguments, which, however, is not sufficient to decide whether software measures are good predictors for program comprehension. Our goal is to evaluate whether and how software measures and program comprehension correlate. To...
The C preprocessor cpp is a powerful and language-independent tool, widely used to implement variable software in different programming languages (C, C++) using conditional compilation. Preprocessor annotations can used on different levels of granularity such as functions or statements. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a relation between code clones and preprocessor annotations. Specifically,...
Software product line engineering provides efficient means to develop variable software. To support program comprehension of software product lines (SPLs), we developed View Infinity, a tool that provides seamless and semantic zooming of different abstraction layers of an SPL. First results of a qualitative study with experienced SPL developers are promising and indicate that View Infinity is useful...
Background: Software product line engineering provides an effective mechanism to implement variable software. However, the usage of preprocessors, which is typical in industry, is heavily criticized, because it often leads to obfuscated code. Using background colors to support comprehensibility has shown effective, however, scalability to large software product lines (SPLs) is questionable. Aim: Our...
The C preprocessor is often used in practice to implement variability in software product lines. Using #ifdef statements provokes problems such as obfuscated source code, yet they will still be used in practice at least in the medium-term future. With CIDE, we demonstrate a tool to improve understanding and maintaining code that contains #ifdef statements by visualizing them with colors and providing...
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