nach oben

Erschienen in:

01.08.2013

Do background colors improve program comprehension in the #ifdef hell?

verfasst von: Janet Feigenspan, Christian Kästner, Sven Apel, Jörg Liebig, Michael Schulze, Raimund Dachselt, Maria Papendieck, Thomas Leich, Gunter Saake

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 4/2013

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

Software-product-line engineering aims at the development of variable and reusable software systems. In practice, software product lines are often implemented with preprocessors. Preprocessor directives are easy to use, and many mature tools are available for practitioners. However, preprocessor directives have been heavily criticized in academia and even referred to as “#ifdef hell”, because they introduce threats to program comprehension and correctness. There are many voices that suggest to use other implementation techniques instead, but these voices ignore the fact that a transition from preprocessors to other languages and tools is tedious, erroneous, and expensive in practice. Instead, we and others propose to increase the readability of preprocessor directives by using background colors to highlight source code annotated with ifdef directives. In three controlled experiments with over 70 subjects in total, we evaluate whether and how background colors improve program comprehension in preprocessor-based implementations. Our results demonstrate that background colors have the potential to improve program comprehension, independently of size and programming language of the underlying product. Additionally, we found that subjects generally favor background colors. We integrate these and other findings in a tool called FeatureCommander, which facilitates program comprehension in practice and which can serve as a basis for further research.

Vorheriger Artikel On the value of outlier elimination on software effort estimation research

Nächster Artikel Performance and reliability prediction for evolving service-oriented software systems

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

We discuss problems arising from preprocessor usage in Section 2.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb

Preattentive perception is the fast recognition of a limited set of visual properties (Goldstein 2002).

http://fosd.net/experiments

Size is between 900 and 40,000 lines of code (von Mayrhauser and Vans 1993).

MobileMedia was developed in eight releases, from which we took the fifth, because it offered the best balance between size and complexity for our experiment. We omitted 9 exception classes and 2 small features for different screen resolutions, because they are irrelevant for understanding the source code and fixing the bugs.

In the source code, there is no #else combination of ifdef directives, so it was always clear from the background colors that feature code concerned selected features.

Figure 4 uses a box plot to describe data (Anderson and Finn 1996). It plots the median as thick line and the quartiles as thin line, so that 50% of all measurements are inside the box. Values that strongly deviate from the median are outliers and drawn as separate dots.

http://www.xenomai.org

http://rtfirewire.dynamized.com

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/usb4rt

http://www.linux-real-time.com

http://fosd.de/cppstats

Code of an else directive is selected when code of an according ifdef directive is not selected.

The tasks are available at the project’s website.

Expected frequencies for single tasks are too small due to the small number of observations.

We cannot provide p values in this case, because due to our small sample, we had to look up whether observed differences are significant in a table of the U distribution (Giventer 2008).

http://fosd.de/fc. On the website, there is also a video demonstrating the use of FeatureCommander. This video shows all functionality of FeatureCommander, not the reduced set we used in the third experiment. FeatureCommander with the reduced set is also available at the website.

To recognize feature code, FeatureCommander uses a file that describes where an ifdef directive starts and where it ends.

http://www.hfes.org/web/Standards/standards.html.

Adams B et al (2008) Aspect mining in the presence of the C preprocessor. In: Proc.AOSD workshop on linking aspect technology and evolution. ACM Press, pp 1–6

Adams B et al (2009) Can we refactor conditional compilation into aspects? In: Proc. Int’l conf. aspect-oriented software development (AOSD). ACM Press, pp 243–254

Anderson T, Finn J (1996) The new statistical analysis of data. Springer

Apel S, Kästner C (2009) An overview of feature-oriented software development. J Obj Techn 8(4):1–36

Apel S et al (2008) Aspectual feature modules. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 34(2):162–180CrossRef

Atkins D et al (2002) Using version control data to evaluate the impact of software tools: a case study of the version editor. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 28(7):625–637CrossRef

Aversano L et al (2002) Handling preprocessor-conditioned declarations. In: Proc. IEEE int’l workshop on source code analysis and manipulation. IEEE CS, pp 83–92

Basili VR (1992) Software modeling and measurement: the goal/question/metric paradigm. Tech. Rep. CS-TR-2956 (UMIACS-TR-92-96)

Baxter ID, Mehlich M (2001) Preprocessor conditional removal by simple partial evaluation. In: Proc. working conf. reverse engineering (WCRE). IEEE CS, pp 281–290

Boehm B (1981) Software engineering economics. Prentice Hall

Boysen J (1977) Factors affecting computer program comprehension. PhD thesis, Iowa State University

Brooks R (1978) Using a behavioral theory of program comprehension in software engineering. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). IEEE CS, pp 196–201

Chevalier F et al (2010) Using text animated transitions to support navigation in document histories. In: Proc. conf. human factors in computing systems (CHI). ACM Press, pp 683–692

Chu-Carroll M et al (2003) Visual separation of concerns through multidimensional program storage. In: Proc. int’l conf. aspect-oriented software development (AOSD). ACM Press, pp 188–197

Clements P, Northrop L (2001) Software product lines: practice and patterns. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA

Cliff N (1993) Dominance statistics: ordinal analyses to answer ordinal questions. Psychol Bull 114(3):494–509MathSciNetCrossRef

Cohen J (1969) Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Academic Press

Coppit D et al (2007) Spotlight: a prototype tool for software plans. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). IEEE CS, pp 754–757

Couto MV et al (2011) Extracting software product lines: a case study using conditional compilation. In: Proc. Europ. conf. software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR), pp 191–200

Czarnecki K, Antkiewicz M (2005) Mapping features to models: a template approach based on superimposed variants. In: Proc. int’l conf. generative programming and component engineering (GPCE). Springer, pp 422–437

Daly J et al (1995) The effect of inheritance on the maintainability of object-oriented software: an empirical study. In: Proc. int’l conf. software maintenance (ICSM). IEEE CS, pp 20–29

Diehl S (2007) Software visualization: visualizing the structure, behaviour, and evolution of software. Springer

Dunsmore A, Roper M (2000) A comparative evaluation of program comprehension measures. Tech. Rep. EFoCS 35-2000, Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde

Eick S et al (1992) SeeSoft—a tool for visualizing line oriented software statistics. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 18(11):957–968CrossRef

Ernst M et al (2002) An empirical analysis of C preprocessor use. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 28(12):1146–1170MathSciNetCrossRef

Favre J-M (1995) The CPP paradox. In: Proc. European workshop on software maintenance

Favre J-M (1997) Understanding-in-the-large. In: Proc. int’l workshop on program comprehension (IWPC). IEEE CS, p 29

Feigenspan J (2009) Empirical comparison of FOSD approaches regarding program comprehension—a feasibility study. Master’s thesis, University of Magdeburg

Feigenspan J et al (2009) How to compare program comprehension in FOSD empirically - an experience report. In: Proc. int’l workshop on feature-oriented software development. ACM Press, pp 55–62

Feigenspan J et al (2010) Visual support for understanding product lines. In: Proc. int’l conf. program comprehension (ICPC). IEEE CS, Demo Paper, pp 34–35

Feigenspan J et al (2011a) FeatureCommander: colorful #ifdef world. In: Software product line conference (SPLC), paper 3. ACM Press, pp 1–2

Feigenspan J et al (2011b) Using background colors to support program comprehension in software product lines. In: Proc. int’l conf. evaluation and assessment in software engineering (EASE). Institution of Engineering and Technology, pp 66–75

Figueiredo E et al (2008) Evolving software product lines with aspects: an empirical study on design stability. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). ACM Press, pp 261–270

Fisher D, Tan K (1989) Visual displays: the highlighting paradox. Human Factors 31(1):17–30

Garrido A, Johnson RE (2005) Analyzing multiple configurations of a C program. In: Proc. int’l conf. software maintenance (ICSM). IEEE CS, pp 379–388

Giventer L (2008) Statistical analysis for public administration, 2nd edn. Jones and Bartlett Publishing

Goldstein B (2002) Sensation and perception, 5th edn. Cengage Learning Services

Hanenberg S (2010) An experiment about static and dynamic type sytems. In: Proc. int’l conf. object-oriented programming, systems, languages and applications (OOPSLA). ACM Press, pp 22–35

Harrison W, Ossher H (1993) Subject-oriented programming: a critique of pure objects. In: Proc. int’l conf. object-oriented programming, systems, languages and applications (OOPSLA). IEEE CS, pp 411–428

Heidenreich F et al (2008) FeatureMapper: mapping features to models. In: Comp. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). ACM Press, Demo Paper, pp 943–944

Hofer W et al (2010) Toolchain-independent variant management with the Leviathan filesystem. In: Proc. int’l workshop on feature-oriented software development (FOSD). ACM Press, pp 18–24

Hu Y et al (2000) C/C++ conditional compilation analysis using symbolic execution. In: Proc. int’l conf. software maintenance (ICSM). IEEE CS, pp 196–206

Kästner C (2010) Virtual separation of concerns: preprocessors 2.0. PhD thesis, University of Magdeburg

Kästner C et al (2008) Granularity in software product lines. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). ACM Press, pp 311–320

Kästner C et al (2009a) A model of refactoring physically and virtually separated features. In: Proc. int’l conf. generative programming and component engineering (GPCE). ACM Press, pp 157–166

Kästner C et al (2009b) FeatureIDE: tool framework for feature-oriented software development. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). IEEE CS, Demo Paper, pp 611–614

Kiczales G et al (1997) Aspect-oriented programming. In: Proc. Europ. conf. object-oriented programming (ECOOP). Springer, pp 220–242

Kitchenham B et al (2008) Evaluating guidelines for reporting empirical software engineering studies. Empir Software Eng 13(1):97–121CrossRef

Koenemann J, Robertson S (1991) Expert problem solving strategies for program comprehension. In: Proc. conf. human factors in computing systems (CHI). ACM Press, pp 125–130

Krone M, Snelting G (1994) On the inference of configuration structures from source code. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). IEEE CS, pp 49–57

Kullbach B, Riediger V (2001) Folding: an approach to enable program understanding of preprocessed languages. In: Proc. working conf. reverse engineering (WCRE). IEEE CS, pp 3–12

Levkowitz H, Herman GT (1992) Color scales for image data. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 12(1):72–80CrossRef

Liebig J et al (2010) An analysis of the variability in forty preprocessor-based software product lines. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). ACM Press, pp 105–114

Liebig J et al (2011) Analyzing the discipline of preprocessor annotations in 30 million lines of C code. In: Proc. int’l conf. aspect-oriented software development (AOSD). ACM Press, pp 191–202

Likert R (1932) A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Arch Psychol 22(140):1–55

Livadas P, Small D (1994) Understanding code containing preprocessor constructs. In: Proc. int’l workshop program comprehension (IWPC). IEEE CS, pp 89–97

Lohmann D et al (2006) A quantitative analysis of aspects in the eCos kernel. In: Proc. Europ. conf. computer systems (EuroSys). ACM Press, pp 191–204

McCloskey B, Brewer E (2005) ASTEC: a new approach to refactoring C. In: Proc. Europ. software engineering conf./foundations of software engineering (ESEC/FSE). ACM Press, pp 21–30

Miller G (1956) The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychol Rev 63(2):81–97CrossRef

Mook D (1996) Motivation: the organization of action, 2nd edn. W.W. Norton & Co

Muthig D, Patzke T (2003) Generic implementation of product line components. In: Int’l conf. NetObjectDays. Springer, pp 313–329

Oberg B, Notkin D (1992) Error reporting with graduated color. IEEE Softw 9(6):33–38CrossRef

Otero M, Dolado J (2004) Evaluation of the comprehension of the dynamic modeling in UML. J Inf Softw Technol 46(1):35–53CrossRef

Overbey JL, Johnson RE (2009) Software language engineering. In: Generating rewritable abstract syntax trees, pp 114–133.

Pearse T, Oman P (1997) Experiences developing and maintaining software in a multi-platform environment. In: Proc. int’l conf. software maintenance (ICSM). IEEE CS, pp 270–277

Pennington N (1987) Stimulus structures and mental representations in expert comprehension of computer programs. Cogn Psychol 19(3):295–341CrossRef

Pohl K et al (2005) Software product line engineering: foundations, principles, and techniques. Springer

Prechelt L et al (2002) Two controlled experiments assessing the usefulness of design pattern documentation in program maintenance. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 28(6):595–606CrossRef

Prehofer C (1997) Feature-oriented programming: a fresh look at objects. In: Europ. conf. on objectoriented programming (ECOOP). Springer, pp 419–443

Rambally G (1986) The influence of color on program readability and comprehensibility. In: Proc. technical symposium on computer science education (SIGCSE). ACM Press, pp 173–181

Ribeiro M et al (2010) Emergent feature modularization. In: Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on object oriented programming systems languages and applications companion (SPLASH). ACM Press, pp 11–18

Rice J (1991) Display color coding: 10 rules of thumb. IEEE Softw 8(1):86–88

Riggs R et al (2003) Programming wireless devices with the java 2 platform, micro edition. Sun Microsystems, Inc

Shaft T, Vessey I (1995) The relevance of application domain knowledge: the case of computer program comprehension. Inf Syst Res 6(3):286–299CrossRef

Shapiro S, Wilk M (1965) An analysis of variance test for normality (complete samples). Biometrika 52(3/4):591–611MathSciNetMATHCrossRef

Shneiderman B, Mayer R (1979) Syntactic/semantic interactions in programmer behavior: a model and experimental results. Int J Parallel Prog 8(3):219–238MATH

Singh N et al (2006) CViMe: viewing conditionally compiled C/C++ sources through java. In: Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications. ACM Press, pp 730–731

Singh N et al (2007) C-CLR: a tool for navigating highly configurable system software. In: Proc. workshop aspects, components, and patterns for infrastr. software. ACM Press

Smaragdakis Y, Batory D (1998) Implementing layered designs with mixin layers. In: Proc. Europ. conf. object-oriented programming (ECOOP). Springer, pp 550–570

Soloway E, Ehrlich K (1984) Empirical studies of programming knowledge. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 10(5):595–609CrossRef

Someren M et al (1994) The think aloud method: a practical guide to modelling cognitive processes. Academic Press

Spencer H, Collyer G (1992) #ifdef considered harmful or portability experience with C news. In: Proc. USENIX conf. USENIX Association, pp 185–198

Spinellis D (2003) Global analysis and transformations in preprocessed languages. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 29(11):1019–1030CrossRef

Standish T (1984) An essay on software reuse. IEEE Trans Softw Eng SE–10(5):494–497CrossRef

Stengel M et al (2011) View infinity: a zoomable interface for feature-oriented software development. In: Proc. int’l conf. software engineering (ICSE). ACM Press, pp 1031–1033

Tamborello F, Byrne M (2007) Adaptive but non-optimal visual search with highlighted displays. Cogn Syst Res 8(3):182–191CrossRef

Tartler R et al (2011) Feature consistency in compile-time configurable system software. In: Proc. Europ. conf. computer systems conference (EuroSys). ACM Press, pp 47–60

Tiarks R (2011) What programmers really do: an observational study’. In: Proc. workshop software reengineering (WSR), pp 36–37

Tichy WF (1998) Should computer scientists experiment more? Computer 31(5):32–40MathSciNetCrossRef

Vidacs L et al (2004) Columbus schema for C/C++ preprocessing. In: Proc. Europ. conf. software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR). IEEE CS, pp 75–84

von Mayrhauser A, Vans A (1993) From program comprehension to tool requirements for an industrial environment. In: Proc. int’l workshop program comprehension (IWPC). IEEE CS, pp 78–86

von Mayrhauser A et al (1997) Program understanding behaviour during enhancement of large-scale software. J Softw Maint: Res Pract 9(5):299–327CrossRef

von Mayrhauser A, Vans M (1995) Program comprehension during software maintenance and evolution. Computer 28(8):44–55CrossRef

Ware C (2000) Information visualization: perception for design. Morgan Kaufmann

Wijffelaars M et al (2008) Generating color palettes using intuitive parameters. Comput Graph Forum 27(3):743–750CrossRef

Yang W (1994) How to merge program texts. J Syst Softw 27(2):129–135CrossRef

Yellott J (1971) Correction for fast guessing and the speed accuracy trade-off in choice reaction time. J Math Psych 8(2):159–199MathSciNetMATHCrossRef

Titel: Do background colors improve program comprehension in the #ifdef hell?
verfasst von: Janet Feigenspan
Christian Kästner
Sven Apel
Jörg Liebig
Michael Schulze
Raimund Dachselt
Maria Papendieck
Thomas Leich
Gunter Saake
Publikationsdatum: 01.08.2013
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 4/2013
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9208-x

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 4/2013

Performance and reliability prediction for evolving service-oriented software systems

Software model synthesis using satisfiability solvers

Using error abstraction and classification to improve requirement quality: conclusions from a family of four empirical studies

STAMINA: a competition to encourage the development and assessment of software model inference techniques

On the value of outlier elimination on software effort estimation research