VARIABILITY 2026
Tue 29 September - Fri 2 October 2026
Fri 2 Oct 2026 14:45 - 15:07 at PANORAMA - Feature Mining, Identification and Traceability Chair(s): Sophie Fortz

Feature identification in clone-and-own systems remains largely manual and time-consuming, as features are inherently semantic yet existing automated approaches rely on syntactic analysis, failing to capture semantically equivalent features across independently developed variants. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative through their semantic code understanding, but their context window limitation makes direct application to large software systems infeasible. In this paper, we present Semantic-driven Feature Identification using Transformers (SeFIT), a hierarchical decomposition-aggregation pipeline that overcomes this limitation by recursively partitioning systems into processable components, identifying features in each, and unifying them via transformer-based embeddings and HDBSCAN clustering. SeFIT requires no prior system knowledge, no manual effort, and scales independently of codebase size. We evaluate SeFIT on two established subject systems, ApoGames and ArgoUML, and establish a first performance baseline for fully automated semantic feature identification. Our results demonstrate that SeFIT is the first approach to overcome the context window problem and shows the practical potential of LLMs for variability mining in large-scale software systems, outperforming a syntax-based approach.

Fri 2 Oct

Displayed time zone: Athens change

14:00 - 15:30
Feature Mining, Identification and TraceabilityResearch Papers / Journal First at PANORAMA
Chair(s): Sophie Fortz Inria, Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA
14:00
22m
Talk
Benefits and Drawbacks of Extensive User Involvement in Variability Mining: A User Study in the CPPS Domain
Research Papers
Alexander Stummer , Shubham Sharma , Rick Rabiser LIT CPS, Johannes Kepler University Linz
14:22
22m
Talk
Overhead of Recording Feature Locations with Embedded Annotations
Research Papers
Johan Martinson Ruhr University Bochum, Kevin Hermann Ruhr University Bochum, Thorsten Berger Ruhr University Bochum
14:45
22m
Talk
Semantic-Driven Feature Identification In Software Variants Using Transformers
Research Papers
Johannes Stümpfle University of Stuttgart, Sebastian Baum , Jonathan Fuss , Lennard Hettich , Nasser Jazdi University of Stuttgart, Michael Weyrich Universiy of Stuttgart
15:07
15m
Talk
A taxonomy of functional security features and how they can be located
Journal First
Kevin Hermann Ruhr University Bochum, Simon Schneider Hamburg University of Technology, Catherine Tony Hamburg University of Technology, Asli Yardim , Sven Peldszus Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Thorsten Berger Ruhr University Bochum, Riccardo Scandariato Hamburg University of Technology, M. Angela Sasse University College London, Alena Naiakshina Ruhr University Bochum