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Kevin Feichtinger

Publications and source records attributed to Kevin Feichtinger.

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The ARDoCo Tool Landscape: REST API, TraceView, and TraceViz for Architecture Traceability

Context and Problem. Software development produces interrelated artifacts like software architecture documentation (SAD), software architecture models (SAMs), and source code, whose relationships are essential for maintenance and consistency checking. However, automatically recovering links between these artifacts (traceability link recovery (TLR)) remains difficult to deploy in practice. Method and Aim. We present an accessible tool landscape for ARDoCo's TLR approaches: the ARDoCo REST API exposes four TLR pipelines (SAD-SAM, SAM-Code, SAD-Code, and SAD-SAM-Code) via HTTP endpoints with asynchronous execution and caching; TraceView is a browser-based frontend with a guided wizard and interactive multi-panel exploration of recovered links and inconsistencies; and TraceViz, which is a VS Code extension that overlays trace links directly onto documentation in the IDE. Results and Conclusion. All three components are publicly deployed and usable. A preliminary study for TraceViz's in-IDE visualization confirmed that it improves developer comprehension during software understanding tasks. The tool landscape makes state-of-the-art TLR accessible to architects, developers, and tool integrators. Video. We provide a screencast of our ARDoCo Tool Landscape and how it is used here: https://youtu.be/IOTEPZQ3tVs

cs.SE

On the Challenges of Transforming UVL to IVML

Software product line techniques encourage the reuse and adaptation of software components for creating customized products or software systems. These different product variants have commonalities and differences, which are managed by variability modeling. Over the past three decades, both academia and industry have developed numerous variability modeling methods, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Many of these methods have demonstrated their utility within specific domains or applications. However, comprehending the capabilities and differences among these approaches to pinpoint the most suitable one for a particular use case remains challenging. Thus, new modeling techniques and tailored tools for handling variability are frequently created. Transitioning between variability models through transformations from different approaches can help in understanding the benefits and drawbacks of different modeling approaches. However, implementing such transformations presents challenges, such as semantic preservation and avoiding information loss. TRAVART is a tool that helps with transitioning between different approaches by enabling the transformation of variability models into other variability models of different types. This paper discusses the challenges for such transformations between UVL and IVML. It also presents a one-way transformation from the UVL to IVML with as little information loss as possible.

cs.SE

Variability Modeling of Products, Processes, and Resources in Cyber-Physical Production Systems Engineering

Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs), such as automated car manufacturing plants, execute a configurable sequence of production steps to manufacture products from a product portfolio. In CPPS engineering, domain experts start with manually determining feasible production step sequences and resources based on implicit knowledge. This process is hard to reproduce and highly inefficient. In this paper, we present the Extended Iterative Process Sequence Exploration (eIPSE) approach to derive variability models for products, processes, and resources from a domain-specific description. To automate the integrated exploration and configuration process for a CPPS, we provide a toolchain which automatically reduces the configuration space and allows to generate CPPS artifacts, such as control code for resources. We evaluate the approach with four real-world use cases, including the generation of control code artifacts, and an observational user study to collect feedback from engineers with different backgrounds. The results confirm the usefulness of the eIPSE approach and accompanying prototype to straightforwardly configure a desired CPPS.

cs.SE