| | |
Summary: Feature Cohesion in Software Product Lines:
An Exploratory Study
Sven Apel
University of Passau, Germany
Dirk Beyer
University of Passau, Germany
Simon Fraser University, B.C., Canada
ABSTRACT
Software product lines gain momentum in research and industry.
Many product-line approaches use features as a central abstraction
mechanism. Feature-oriented software development aims at encap-
sulating features in cohesive units to support program comprehen-
sion, variability, and reuse. Surprisingly, not much is known about
the characteristics of cohesion in feature-oriented product lines, al-
though proper cohesion is of special interest in product-line engi-
neering due to its focus on variability and reuse. To fill this gap,
we conduct an exploratory study on forty software product lines
of different sizes and domains. A distinguishing property of our
approach is that we use both classic software measures and novel
measures that are based on distances in clustering layouts, which
|
