Comprehensibility of Heterogeneous Configuration Knowledge

Abstract

An essential part of configurable software systems is the configuration knowledge (CK), which is used by developers to derive customized products. Proper comprehension of the CK is key to achieve correct product customization. However, each configurable system is often built with heterogeneous software technologies, such as diverse types of frameworks. These technologies impose the use of additional concepts on the definition of the CK, thereby making it harder to comprehend. This paper presents a domain specific modeling technique aimed at improving the comprehensibility of the CK in framework-based configurable systems. We also present the results of a user study that compares domain-specific modeling with two other state-of-the-art CK techniques, namely annotation-based and general-purpose modeling. We analyzed the impact of these techniques on the CK comprehensibility across three configurable systems. The results strongly suggest that: (i) domain-specific models improve the CK comprehensibility; (ii) the use of general purpose models imposes significant obstacles to the CK comprehension; and (iii) participants who worked with domain-specific models rated the comprehension tasks as easier than those that worked without these models.