RUB » Bibliotheksportal

David Stechow, Philipp Kusmierz

• Features are the building blocks that form the functionality and purpose of a software system. They represent specific requirements and functionality. As the complexity of a software system grows, managing and extending these features becomes a complex task. Without proper documentation and a clear overview of the given features, the process of identifying, understanding, and modifying specific features can become a time-consuming task. Developers often need to navigate the system to locate and understand the implementation of certain features. The challenge lies not only in recognizing where a feature is implemented, but also in understanding its interactions with other components. Properly annotating these features and associating them with relevant parts of the code, helps the developer to identify and address feature-specific changes. However, the benefits of just a textbased feature annotating tool are limited and therefore visualisation would be a good approach to improve the understanding of how and where features are connected within a software system. Visualisation can provide a representation of how certain features interact with each other without getting lost in code or implementation details. When done in a meaningful way, visualisation can offer insights that might remain hidden in textual annotations alone such as trends, patterns and dependencies which could potentially lead to optimization opportunities. In this context, the task of this bachelor thesis is to extend the capabilities of the feature annotation software HAnS while also reimplementing and extending the given visualisation approach.