The benefits of Software Product Lines (SPL) are very appealing: software development becomes better, faster, and cheaper. Unfortunately, these benefits come at the expense of a migration from a family of products to a SPL. Feature Location could be useful in achieving the transition to SPLs. This work presents our FeLLaCaM approach for Feature Location. Our approach calculates similarity to a description of the feature to locate, occurrences where the candidate features remain unchanged, and changes performed to the candidate features throughout the retrospective of the product family. We evaluated our approach in two long-living industrial domains: a model-based family of firmwares for induction hobs that was developed over more than 15 years, and a model-based family of PLC software to control trains that was developed over more than 25 years. In our evaluation, we compare our FeLLaCaM approach with two other approaches for Feature Location: (1) FLL (Feature Location through Latent Semantic Analysis) and (2) FLC (Feature Location through Comparisons). We measure the performance of FeLLaCaM, FLL, and FLC in terms of recall, precision, Matthews Correlation Coefficient, and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. The results show that FeLLaCaM outperforms FLL and FLC.
Autores: Carlos Cetina / Jaime Font / Lorena Arcega / Francisca Pérez /
Palabras Clave: Architecture sustainability - Feature location - Long-Living software systems - Model-Driven Engineering - software product lines
Context: Traceability Links Recovery (TLR), Bug Localization (BL), and Feature Location (FL) are amongst the most relevant tasks performed during software maintenance. However, most research in the field targets code, while models have not received enough attention yet.Objective: This paper presents our approach (FROM, Fragment Retrieval on Models) that uses an Evolutionary Algorithm to retrieve the most relevant model fragments for three different types of input queries: natural language requirements for TLR, bug descriptions for BL, and feature descriptions for FL.Method: FROM uses an Evolutionary Algorithm that generates model fragments through genetic operations, and assesses the relevance of each model fragment with regard to the provided query through a fitness configuration. We analyze the influence that four fitness configurations have over the results of FROM, combining three objectives: Similitude, Understandability, and Timing. To analyze this, we use a real-world case study from our industrial partner, which is a worldwide leader in train manufacturing. We record the results in terms of recall, precision, and F-measure. Moreover, results are compared against those obtained by a baseline, and a statistical analysis is performed to provide evidences of the significance of the results.Results: The results show that FROM can be applied in our industrial case study. Also, the results show that the configurations and the baseline have significant differences in performance for TLR, BL, and FL tasks. Moreover, our results show that there is no single configuration that is powerful enough to obtain the best results in all tasks.Conclusions: The type of task performed (TLR, BL, and FL) during the retrieval of model fragments has an actual impact on the results of the configurations of the Evolutionary Algorithm. Our findings suggest which configuration offers better results as well as the objectives that do not contribute to improve the results.
Autores: Francisca Pérez / Raúl Lapeña / Jaime Font / Carlos Cetina /
Palabras Clave: Bug localization - Conceptual models - Evolutionary algorithms - Feature location - Traceability links recovery
In the context of Model-Driven Engineering applied to video games, software models are high-level abstractions that represent source code implementations of varied content such as the stages of the game, vehicles, or enemy entities (e.g., final bosses). In this work, we present our Evolutionary Model Generation (EMoGen) approach to generate software models that are comparable in quality to the models created by human developers. Our approach is based on an evolution (mutation and crossover) and assessment cycle to generate the software models. We evaluated the software models generated by EMoGen in the Kromaia video game, which is a commercial video game released on Steam and PlayStation 4. Each model generated byEMoGen has more than 1000 model elements. The results, which compare the software models generated by our approach and those generated by the developers, show that our approach achieves results that are comparable to the ones created manually by the developers in the retail and digital versions of the video game case study. However, our approach only takes five hours of unattended time in comparison to ten months of work by the developers. We perform a statistical analysis, and we make an implementation of EMoGen readily available.
Autores: Daniel Blasco / Jaime Font / Mar Zamorano / Carlos Cetina /
Palabras Clave: Game Software Engineering - Model-Driven Engineering - Search-Based Software Engineering
