Software product line conference paper presentation

1. © Fraunhofer IESE
SUPPORTING THE ANALYSIS OF BUG
PREVALENCE IN SOFTWARE PRODUCT
LINES WITH PRODUCT GENEALOGY
Thiago Burgos
thiago.burgos@iese.fraunhofer.de
Martin Becker
martin.becker@iese.fraunhofer.de
Elisa Nakagawa
elisa@icmc.usp.br

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Fraunhofer-Institute for
Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Leading Institute for Software Engineering
Founded in 1996 in Kaiserslautern, Germany
200 employees
Focus on software engineering
 Provide innovative and value-adding
customer solutions with measurable effects
 Advance the state-of-the art
in software and system engineering
 Promote the importance of empirically based
software and system engineering
www.iese.fraunhofer.de

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What is the problem?
 Imagine that inside your SPL you discover one (major) BUG in one of your
released products…
 Are going to fix this bug only for this product?
 Probably this same bug can be present in several other releases
(of different variants/versions)!
 The problem is:
How to find out which other product
releases also contain this same bug?

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Background
 Bug Prevalence means the extent of
products that are affected by a particular bug.
 The term was derived from disease prevalence
which is used in the medical world vocabulary, in
the epidemiology field.
 In single systems development, this concept
should only concern with evolution in time.
 Finding the bug prevalence of a certain bug is still
a challenge and a highly relevant topic, since
besides the evolution in time there is also the
evolution in space (variants).

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Research Questions
1. Given a set of products from a product family, and a bug in one of them,
which other products will exhibit the same bug (Bug Prevalence)?
2. If an asset is changed, which products should be affected by the propagation
of this change?
A similar type of analysis can be performed to provide support to these two
research questions.

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The Analogy [2/2]
 Phenotypes X Functional Behavior
 Variation decision resulting in an observable
behavior or characteristic.
 Alleles x Variability Decisions
 The allele (the chosen variation of the asset) that
determines the phenotype (ex. the bug), not the
gene itself (the asset).
 Family Genealogy Tree X
Product Genealogy Tree (PGT)
 Hierarchical structure showing the path that the
genes took during the familiy evolution.
 PGT is composed by product releases
The diagram shows a cell
reproducing asexually
Family Genealogy Tree Example

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Product Genealogy Approach
 The Product Genealogy Approach was designed to support the
analysis of bug prevalence.
 Two main usage scenarios:
1. Before a bug fix, to identify the bug prevalence, and discover other
products that this bug needs to be also fixed; and
2. After a change is performed, in order to identify the real impacts of
the change on other products.

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Product Genealogy Approach
Phases and steps

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Product Genealogy Tree
UML Representation

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Example
• Information for the PGT Creation
(Phase 1) can be extracted from
version control repository
 Branching Structure (Variants)
 Release Tags (Product Releases )
 Merges (Propagations)
• Depending on the the first
analysis, a second round of
analysis must be done with a
broader scope (based on the PGT
relationships)
First scope
of analysis

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Concluding Remarks and Future Work
 It is less time consuming and more effective if we start analyzing the
product releases with a reduced set of possibilities (with a higher
probability of having the bug) compared to an initial multitude of products.
 Bugs are real practical problems, and therefore the approach has a real
chance to be applied in practice.
 Major contributions
The Product
Genealogy
Approach
The Analogy
Provides the foundation
concepts for the approach

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Controller
Future Contribution – Adaptive System
(Out of the scope of task 3.5)
Feature
models
µTVL
PCL
Features x 𝝙
PSL
Products x
Features
PAL
Products x
Adaptations
Product Adaptation Language
Deployed
Product
Adaptation
Infrastructure
from Radu‘s
Team
Feature 1
Development
Time
Run Time
PALMonitoring
Gets PAL rules
Sends information
According to some
conditions, automatically
triggers the adaptation
Contact:
Thiago Burgos Fraunhofer-Platz 1
67663 Kaiserslautern
Telefon +49(631) 6800-2262
Embedded Systems thiago.burgos@iese.fraunhofer.de
Development www.iese.fraunhofer.de
Thank you! Questions?
Obrigado! Perguntas?