Modeling Features at Runtime

A feature represents a functional requirement fulfilled by a system. Since many maintenance tasks are expressed in terms of features, it is important to establish the correspondence between a feature and its implementation in source code. Traditional approaches to establish this correspondence exercise features to generate a trace of runtime events, which is then processed by post-mortem analysis. These approaches typically generate large amounts of data to analyze. Due to their static nature, these approaches do not support incremental and interactive analysis of features. We propose a radically different approach called live feature analysis, which provides a model at runtime of features. Our approach analyzes features on a running system and also makes it possible to “grow” feature representations by exercising different scenarios of the same feature, and identifies execution elements even to the sub-method level. We describe how live feature analysis is implemented effecti...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MODELS
• Authors: Marcus Denker, Jorge Ressia, Orla Greevy, Oscar Nierstrasz
• Keywords: Abstract Syntax Trees, Complete Feature Representation, Live Feature Analysis, MODELS 2010, Natural Language Processing