The decentralized nature of collaborations between objects in object-oriented software makes it difficultto understand the implementations of user-observable program features and their respectiveinterdependencies. As feature-centric program understanding and modification are essential duringsoftware maintenance and evolution, this situation needs to change. In this paper, we present Featureous,an integrated development environment built on top of the NetBeans IDE that facilitates feature-centricanalysis of object-oriented software. Our integrated development environment encompasses alightweight feature location mechanism, a number of reusable analytical views, and necessary APIs forsupporting future extensions. The base of the integrated development environment is a conceptualframework comprising of three complementary dimensions of comprehension: perspective, abstractionand granularity. Together, these dimensions allow the analyst to focus the analysis at the right mode ofcomprehension during software evolution. We demonstrate applicability of our integrated developmentenvironment by conducting a case study of change adoption using the JHotDraw SVG.
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