Visualization of feature locations with the tool FeatureDashboard

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Modern development processes and issue trackers often use the notion of features to manage a software system. Features allow communicating system characteristics across stakeholders and keeping an overview understanding - especially important for systems that exist in many different variants. However, maintaining, evolving or reusing features (e.g., propagating across variants, or integrating into a platform) requires knowing their locations to prevent extensive feature-location recovery. We advocate the use of embedded annotations, added directly into software assets by the developers during development. To support this process and provide immediate benefits to developers when using such annotations, we present the open-source tool FeatureDashboard. It extracts and visualizes features and their locations using different views and metrics. As such, it encourages developers recording features and their locations early, to prevent feature identification and location efforts, as well as it supports system comprehension.