Investigating the effect of evolution and refactorings on feature scattering

摘要

The implementation of a functional requirement is often distributed across several modules posing difficulties to software maintenance. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the extent of feature scattering and study its evolution with the passage of software versions. To this end, we trace the classes and methods involved in the implementation of a feature, apply formal approaches for studying variations across versions, measure whether feature implementation is uniformly distributed and visualize the reuse among features. Moreover, we investigate the impact of refactoring application on feature scattering in order to assess the circumstances under which a refactoring might improve the distribution of methods implementing a feature. The proposed techniques are exemplified for various features on several versions of four open-source projects.