Investigating Variability-aware Smells in SPLs: An Exploratory Study

• Iuri Santos Souza UFRB
• Ivan Machado UFBA
• Carolyn Seaman UMBC
• Gecynalda Gomes UFBA
• Christina Chavez UFBA
• Eduardo Santana de Almeida UFBA
• Paulo Masiero UFBA

Resumo

Variability-aware smell is a concept referring to artifact shortcomings in the context of highly-configurable systems that can degrade aspects such as program comprehension, maintainability, and evolvability. To the best of our knowledge, there is very little evidence that variability-aware smells exist in Software Product Lines (SPLs). This work presents an exploratory study that investigated (I) evidence that variability-aware smells exist in SPLs and (II) new types of variability-aware smell not yet documented in the literature based on a quantitative study with open source SPL projects. We collected quantitative data to generate reliable research evidence, by performing feature model and source code inspections on eleven open-source SPL projects. Our findings revealed that (1) instances of variability-aware smells exist in open-source SPL projects and (2) feature information presented significant associations with variability-aware smells. Furthermore, (3) the study presented six new types of variability-aware smells.

 

Palavras-chave: Variability-Aware Smells, Software Product Lines, Empirical Study, Exploratory Study

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