Enriching Reverse Engineering with Feature Analysis

Features are abstractions of a software software system encapsulating knowledge of its problem domain, denoting units of system behavior. To exploit this inherent domain knowledge of features to analyze object-oriented software systems we explicitly model features, their relationships to source artefacts, and their relationships to each other. The contribution of this work is twofold: on the one hand: (1) we enrich reverse engineering analysis of object-oriented systems with semantic knowledge of features, and (2) we introduce new techniques treating features as the primary entities of software systemanalysis. We define Dynamix, a meta-model for expressing feature entities in the context of a structural meta-model of source code entities. Using case studies, we demonstrate how our feature-centric re- verse engineering techniques, based on Dynamix, exploit feature knowledge to establish traceability between the problem and solution domains throughout the life-cycle of a system.