GPCE 2017
Mon 23 - Tue 24 October 2017 Vancouver, Canada
co-located with SPLASH 2017
Mon 23 Oct 2017 14:20 - 14:45 at Regency A - Variability Chair(s): Ina Schaefer

Preprocessor annotations (e.g., #ifdef in C) enable the development of similar, but distinct software variants from a common code base. One particularly popular preprocessor is the C preprocessor, cpp. But the cpp is also widely criticized for impeding software maintenance by making code hard to understand and change. Yet, evidence to support this criticism is scarce. In this paper, we investigate the relation between cpp usage and maintenance effort, which we approximate with the frequency and extent of source code changes. To this end, we mined the version control repositories of eight open- source systems written in C. For each system, we measured if and how individual functions use cpp annotations and how they were changed. We found that functions containing cpp annotations are generally changed more frequently and more profoundly than other functions. However, when accounting for function size, the differences disappear or are greatly diminished. In summary, with respect to the frequency and extent of changes, our findings do not support the criticism of the cpp regarding maintainability.

http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N47296
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Mon 23 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

13:30 - 15:00
VariabilityGPCE 2017 at Regency A
Chair(s): Ina Schaefer Technische Universität Braunschweig
13:30
25m
Talk
A Classification of Variation Control Systems
GPCE 2017
Lukas Linsbauer Johannes Kepler University Linz, Thorsten Berger Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden / University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Paul Grünbacher JKU Linz, Austria
DOI Authorizer link
13:55
25m
Talk
Analyzing the Impact of Natural Language Processing over Feature Location in Models
GPCE 2017
Raúl Lapeña San Jorge University, Spain, Jaime Font San Jorge University, Spain, Oscar Pastor Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain, Carlos Cetina San Jorge University, Spain
DOI Authorizer link
14:20
25m
Talk
How Preprocessor Annotations (Do Not) Affect Maintainability: A Case Study on Change-PronenessBest Paper
GPCE 2017
Wolfram Fenske University of Magdeburg, Germany, Sandro Schulze University of Magdeburg, Germany, Gunter Saake University of Magdeburg, Germany
DOI Authorizer link