NDLI: Preprocessor-based variability in open-source and industrial software systems: An empirical study

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Hunsen, Claus Zhang, Bo Siegmund, Janet Kästner, Christian Leßenich, Olaf Becker, Martin Apel, Sven
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Almost every sufficiently complex software system today is configurable. Conditional compilation is a simple variability-implementation mechanism that is widely used in open-source projects and industry. Especially, the C preprocessor (CPP) is very popular in practice, but it is also gaining (again) interest in academia. Although there have been several attempts to understand and improve CPP, there is a lack of understanding of how it is used in open-source and industrial systems and whether different usage patterns have emerged. The background is that much research on configurable systems and product lines concentrates on open-source systems, simply because they are available for study in the first place. This leads to the potentially problematic situation that it is unclear whether the results obtained from these studies are transferable to industrial systems. We aim at lowering this gap by comparing the use of CPP in open-source projects and industry—especially from the embedded-systems domain—based on a substantial set of subject systems and well-known variability metrics, including size, scattering, and tangling metrics. A key result of our empirical study is that, regarding almost all aspects we studied, the analyzed open-source systems and the considered embedded systems from industry are similar regarding most metrics, including systems that have been developed in industry and made open source at some point. So, our study indicates that, regarding CPP as variability-implementation mechanism, insights, methods, and tools developed based on studies of open-source systems are transferable to industrial systems—at least, with respect to the metrics we considered.
Starting Page	449
Ending Page	482
Page Count	34
File Format	PDF
ISSN	13823256
Journal	Empirical Software Engineering
Volume Number	21
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	15737616
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2015-04-14
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	C preprocessor cppstats Variability Configurable systems Open-source systems Industrial systems Software product lines Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems Programming Languages, Compilers, Interpreters
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Software

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
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9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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