Demonstration title

FEAT - A Tool for Locating, Analyzing, and Describing Concerns in Source Code

Organizers

Martin P. Robillard (University of British Columbia, Canada) Gail C. Murphy (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Day

Wednesday April 24, 2:45-3:30
Thursday April 25, 4:45-5:30

Developers modifying programs repeatedly have to address concerns that are not well modularized in the source code. In such cases, a developer must first locate the implementation of the concern in the source code, and then analyze and document the concern code sufficiently to be able to perform the required modification. In this demonstration, we will present FEAT, a tool for locating, analyzing, and describing the code implementing a concern in a Java system. FEAT supports these tasks by providing users with an abstract model of a program consisting of elements (such as methods) and their dependencies (such as method calls). Program elements and their dependencies can be queried to investigate their relationships, combined to describe a concern, and mapped back to their corresponding location in source code. These capabilities are integrated with a lexical searching feature into a simple, easy-to-use graphical user interface. The demonstration will consist of using the tool to locate and analyze a sample concern scattered in an existing code base. We will also show how the representation of the sample concern in FEAT can be used to investigate the relationships between the captured concern and the base code, and the relationships between the different parts of the concern itself.

More information on the FEAT tool and a free download version are available at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mrobilla/feat