Lightweight Visualization of Software Features with HAnS-viz

Features offer a way to plan software development, but their locations in software assets are often not known.Existing techniques, such as feature-oriented software development, enable traceability of features by implementing features modularly, but are hard to adopt, since they require heavyweight tooling.We believe that feature traceability should be added during development, using lightweight tooling close to the developers' activities.However, adding traceability requires encouragement-ideally in terms of techniques that provide immediate benefits to developers.We present HAnS-viz, an IntelliJ IDE plugin that provides featureoriented visualizations that support developers understand and reason about software systems at the feature level.The visualizations present different kinds of feature characteristics and their location in code.Building on our previous work, HAnS, it uses embedded feature annotations that developers create as they write features to lift code-level assets to feature-level representations.A demo video is available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=e4j40dvJQiQ.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-09-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3748269.3748487
Primary Topic
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Lightweight Visualization of Software Features with HAnS-viz

Johan Martinson, Thorsten Berger, Kevin Hermann, Riman Houbbi et al.
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
article

Lightweight Visualization of Software Features with HAnS-viz

Johan Martinson, Thorsten Berger, Kevin Hermann, Riman Houbbi, David Stechow
article en

Abstract

Features offer a way to plan software development, but their locations in software assets are often not known.Existing techniques, such as feature-oriented software development, enable traceability of features by implementing features modularly, but are hard to adopt, since they require heavyweight tooling.We believe that feature traceability should be added during development, using lightweight tooling close to the developers' activities.However, adding traceability requires encouragement-ideally in terms of techniques that provide immediate benefits to developers.We present HAnS-viz, an IntelliJ IDE plugin that provides featureoriented visualizations that support developers understand and reason about software systems at the feature level.The visualizations present different kinds of feature characteristics and their location in code.Building on our previous work, HAnS, it uses embedded feature annotations that developers create as they write features to lift code-level assets to feature-level representations.A demo video is available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=e4j40dvJQiQ.

Ruhr University Bochum (DE)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Openalex Percentile: Top 88%
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
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