This document proposes a technique called "runtime feature awareness" that allows programs written in Java to recognize and act upon executions of their own features at runtime. This is achieved by combining feature location and traceability links between features and code to expose information about ongoing feature executions to the running program. Potential applications include feature-aware error reporting, usage statistics, and program adaptation. A proof-of-concept implementation is available online.

1. Meta-Level Runtime Feature Awareness
for Java [short]
Andrzej Olszak, Martin Rytter, Bo Nørregaard Jørgensen
{ao, mlrj, bnj}@mmmi.sdu.dk

2. Motivating metaphor
Awareness of
Animals Humans own behavior
a.k.a.
Self-targeted
dynamic
analysis

3. Is your software a frog?
 Feature location
 Mapping features to code
 Traceability links used by programmers
Program
Runtime
User Source code
events
Specifications
Programmer
of features

4. Is your software a frog?
 Feature location
 Mapping features to code
 Traceability links used by programmers
Program
Runtime
User Source code
events
Runtime feature awareness:
Specifications The ability of a program to
Programmer
of features recognize and act upon executions
of its own features

5. JAwareness
 Feature location + exposure of results to traced
program
 Feature entry points are starting points of features

6. Feature-aware error reporting
 Reproducing errors from error messages is hard
 Print errors with names of features that caused them
 Writing custom logger of System.err handler

7. Feature-aware program usage statistics
 Understand how end-users use the program
 Prioritize development efforts, improve usability
 Listener + annotations – no probe methods needed

8. Feature-aware program adaptation
 Adjust to user’s actions as they occur at runtime
 Intelligent ‘tip of the day’, dynamically adaptable UI’s

9. Summary
 Usage of reverse engineering information at runtime
by program themselves
 Making programs recognize and act upon executions of
their own features
 Proof-of-conceptimplementations at:
http://www.featureous.org/jawareness/