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Understanding the Re-Engineering of Variant-Rich Systems: An Empirical Work on Economics, Knowledge, Traceability, and Practices
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Datum
2022
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Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
Zusammenfassung
Most modern software systems exist in different variants to address a variety of requirements, such as customer requests, regulations, or hardware restrictions. In this dissertation, we empirically study four closely related properties in the context of variant-rich systems, namely economics, knowledge, traceability, and practices. First, we contribute a rich dataset on the economics of (re-)engineering variant-rich systems, from which we derive the core insight that moving towards platform engineering (e.g., via more systematic clone management) is economically promising. Second, we contribute an understanding of developers memory and how to support their knowledge needs, leading to the core insight that expensive reco very activities can be mitigated by enforcing suitable documentation techniques (e.g., feature traceability). Third, we contribute insights on how different feature traces impact developers program comprehension, based on which our core insight is that feature traceabi lity should ideally be independent of configurability. Finally, we contribute a process model and recommendations on how to (re-)engineer variant-rich systems, with our core insight being that carefully planning and periodically assessing a variant-rich system helps to exploit its full potential (e.g., in terms of cost savings).