Enhancing Feature Interfaces for Supporting Software Product Line Maintenance

Software product line (SPL) is a technology aimed at speeding up the development process. Although SPLs are widely used, their maintenance is a challenging task. In particular, when maintaining a SPL feature, developers need to know which parts of other dependent features might be affected by this maintenance. Otherwise, further maintenance problems can be introduced in the SPL implementation. However, the identification and understanding of the so-called feature dependencies in the source code are an exhaustive and error-prone task. In fact, developers often ignore unconsciously feature dependencies while reasoning about SPL maintenance. To overcome this problem, this PhD research aims at understanding the properties of feature dependencies in the source code that exert impact on SPL maintenance. Furthermore, we propose a way to structure and segregate feature interfaces in order to help developers to identify and understand feature dependencies, thus reducing the effort and avoiding undesirable side effects in SPL maintenance.