Feature Traceability in Object Oriented Software. Antoniol, G., Merlo, E., Gu�h�neuc, Y., & Sahraoui, H. In Maletic, J. I., Antonio, G., Cleland-Huang, J., & Hayes, J. H., editors, Proceedings of the 3<sup>rd</sup> ASE Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE), pages 73–78, November, 2005. ACM Press. 6 pages.
Feature Traceability in Object Oriented Software [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Open source and industrial software very often lack up-to- date documentation on where and how user observable functionalities are implemented. This lack of documentation is particularly hindering for large software. Moreover, as with any software artifacts, user observable functionalities evolve and are modified through software evolution activities. Modifications of one functionality sometimes has unwanted and unexpected side effects on other functionalities, causing these functionalities to fail or to malfunction. In this position paper, we support the idea that a traceability mapping between user observable functionalities and source code constituents (such as classes, methods…) implementing the functionalities is essential to reduce software evolution effort. We outline an approach to recover and to study the evolution of features—subset of a software constituents—responsible to implement a functionality.

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