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The shape of feature code: an analysis of twenty C-preprocessor-based systems

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Abstract

Feature annotations (e.g., code fragments guarded by #ifdef C-preprocessor directives) control code extensions related to features. Feature annotations have long been said to be undesirable. When maintaining features that control many annotations, there is a high risk of ripple effects. Also, excessive use of feature annotations leads to code clutter, hinder program comprehension and harden maintenance. To prevent such problems, developers should monitor the use of feature annotations, for example, by setting acceptable thresholds. Interestingly, little is known about how to extract thresholds in practice, and which values are representative for feature-related metrics. To address this issue, we analyze the statistical distribution of three feature-related metrics collected from a corpus of 20 well-known and long-lived C-preprocessor-based systems from different domains. We consider three metrics: scattering degree of feature constants, tangling degree of feature expressions, and nesting depth of preprocessor annotations. Our findings show that feature scattering is highly skewed; in 14 systems (70 %), the scattering distributions match a power law, making averages and standard deviations unreliable limits. Regarding tangling and nesting, the values tend to follow a uniform distribution; although outliers exist, they have little impact on the mean, suggesting that central statistics measures are reliable thresholds for tangling and nesting. Following our findings, we then propose thresholds from our benchmark data, as a basis for further investigations.

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Notes

  1. http://rodrigoqueiroz.bitbucket.org/sosym2015.html.

  2. Data available at http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/powerlaws/data.htm.

  3. Multilines are convenient when spanning a long line across multiple ones; during compilation, sequences of multilines are taken as a single line.

  4. http://www.srcml.org/.

  5. http://www.r-project.org/.

  6. xterm change log is available at http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html.

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Acknowledgments

We thank CNPq, CAPES, FAPEMIG, and the German Research Foundation (AP 206/4, AP 206/5, AP 206/6) for partially funding this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Rodrigo Queiroz & Marco Tulio Valente

  2. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Leonardo Passos & Krzysztof Czarnecki

  3. University of Passau, Passau, Germany

    Claus Hunsen & Sven Apel

Authors
  1. Rodrigo Queiroz
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  2. Leonardo Passos
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  3. Marco Tulio Valente
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  4. Claus Hunsen
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  5. Sven Apel
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  6. Krzysztof Czarnecki
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rodrigo Queiroz.

Additional information

Communicated by Prof. Andrzej Wąsowski and Thorsten Weyer.

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Queiroz, R., Passos, L., Valente, M.T. et al. The shape of feature code: an analysis of twenty C-preprocessor-based systems. Softw Syst Model 16, 77–96 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-015-0483-z

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