Feature Location and Extraction using Landmarks and Barriers

Identifying and isolating the source code associated with a particular feature is a problem that frequently arises in many maintenance tasks. The delocalised nature of object-oriented systems, where the code associated with a feature is distributed across many interrelated objects, makes this problem particularly challenging. This paper presents an approach that combines landmark´ methods that have a key role in the execution of a particular feature with slicing to create a call graph of related code. The size of this call graph is constrained by the identification of ´barrier´ methods which exclude parts of the graph that are not of interest. The approach is supported by a tool, and the evaluation on three open-source systems yields encouraging results and demonstrates the practical applicability of the technique.