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Comparing the influence of using feature-oriented programming and conditional compilation on comprehending feature-oriented software

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Abstract

Several variability representations have been proposed over the years. Software maintenance in the presence of variability is known to be hard. One of the reasons is that maintenance tasks require a large amount of cognitive effort for program comprehension. In fact, the different ways of representing variability in source code might influence the comprehension process in different ways. Despite the differences, there is little evidence about how these variability representations – such as conditional-compilation directives or feature-oriented programming – influence program comprehension. Existing research has focused primarily on either understanding how code using modern paradigms evolves compared to the traditional way of realizing variability, namely conditional compilation, or on the aspects influencing the comprehension of conditional compilation only. We used two different programs implemented in Java and each of these variability representations. As Java does not support conditional compilation natively, we relied on the mimicking (i.e., preprocessing annotations in comments) that has been used in the literature. Our results show no significant statistical differences regarding the evaluated measures (correctness, understanding, or response time) in the tasks. Our heterogeneous sample allowed us to produce evidence about the influence of using CC and FOP variability representations on the aspects involved in the comprehension of feature-oriented software, while addressing bug-finding tasks.

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Notes

  1. http://rise.com.br/riselabs/vicc/

  2. Available at http://antenna.sourceforge.net/

  3. Available at http://www.slashdev.ca/javapp/

  4. www.rise.com.br/

  5. Both MobileMedia versions are available at: http://fosd.net/experiments

  6. Both RiSEEvent versions are available at: https://github.com/riselabs-ufba/RiSEEventSPL-FH.

  7. Prophet is free and open-source and available at https://github.com/feigensp/Prophet/

  8. Data available at: http://rise.com.br/riselabs/vicc/data/vicc3/H01_H02-data.pdf

  9. Data available at: http://rise.com.br/riselabs/vicc/data/vicc3/H03-data.pdf

  10. Data available at: http://rise.com.br/riselabs/vicc/data/vicc3/H03-data.pdf

  11. http://rise.com.br/riselabs/vicc/

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Acknowledgment

This work is partially supported by INES (grant CNPq/465614/2014-0), FAPESB (grants BOL0820/2014 and JCB0060/2016), CAPES (grant PDSE 99999.007061/2015-03), the German Research Foundation (AP 206/6, SI 2045/2/̄1), and the Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts in the framework of the Centre Digitisation.Bavaria (ZD.B).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

    Alcemir Rodrigues Santos, Ivan do Carmo Machado & Eduardo Santana de Almeida

  2. University of Passau, Passau, Germany

    Janet Siegmund & Sven Apel

Authors
  1. Alcemir Rodrigues Santos
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  2. Ivan do Carmo Machado
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  3. Eduardo Santana de Almeida
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  4. Janet Siegmund
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  5. Sven Apel
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Correspondence to Alcemir Rodrigues Santos.

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Communicated by: Massimiliano Di Penta

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Appendix Questionnaire

Appendix Questionnaire

Table 13 shows the questionnaire used for the characterization of the programming experience.

Table 13 Questionnaire for measuring programming experience of the participants
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Rodrigues Santos, A., do Carmo Machado, I., Santana de Almeida, E. et al. Comparing the influence of using feature-oriented programming and conditional compilation on comprehending feature-oriented software. Empir Software Eng 24, 1226–1258 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9658-x

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