IDE-assisted visualization of indebted OO variability implementations

Abstract

Object-Oriented (OO) variability-rich software systems often implement their variability in a single codebase, using the mechanisms provided by the host language (i.e., inheritance, overloading, design patterns). This variability is not documented and buried deep down in the code, thus impeding its identification and making it especially prone to variability debt at the code level. While this kind of variability implementation can now be detected, visualization support such as VariCity helps architects and developers understand the implemented variability using a city metaphor. In this paper, we demonstrate VariMetrics-IDE, an extension of VariCity that allows to visualize multiple quality metrics (e.g., code complexity, test coverage) together with the variability implementations, while supporting navigation between the source code and the visualization in an IDE. This extension thus facilitates the identification of zones of variability implementations with variability debt.