Feature Crumbs: Adapting Usage Monitoring to Continuous Software Engineering

摘要

Continuous software engineering relies on explicit user feed-back for the development and improvement of features. The frequent release of feature increments fosters the application of usage monitoring, which promises a broad range of insights. However, it remains a challenge to relate monitored usage data to changes that were introduced by an increment and thereby to a particular specific of a feature. We introduce Feature Crumbs, a lightweight, code-based concept to specify a feature's run-time characteristics. This enables monitored usage data to be allocated to a feature increment. In addition, we analyze the implications for the overall development process. We outline the reference implementation of a platform for collecting, managing, and assessing feature crumbs. We report an evaluation of both the feature crumb concept and the reference implementation in a university capstone course. Feature crumbs and their changes to the development process contribute to the product quality; they enable feature increment assessment in combination with additional knowledge sources, such as decision knowledge.