Feature-Level Change Impact Analysis Using Formal Concept Analysis

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a systematic reuse approach to develop a short time-to-market and quality products, called Software Product Line (SPL). Usually, the SPL is not developed from scratch but it is developed by reusing features (resp. their source code elements) of existing similar systems developed by ad-hoc reuse techniques. The feature implementations may be changed for adapting SPLE context. The change may impact other features that are not interested in the change, as a feature’s implementation spans multiple code elements and shares code elements with other features. Therefore, feature-level Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is needed to predict affected features for change management purpose. In this paper, we propose a feature-level CIA technique using formal concept analysis. In our experimental evaluation using three case studies of different domains and sizes, we show the effectiveness of our technique in terms of the most commonly used metrics on the subject.