KernelHaven -- An Open Infrastructure for Product Line Analysis
This provides a flexible, reproducible tool for researchers and professionals in software engineering to analyze product lines, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SPL analysis concepts.
The authors introduced KernelHaven, an open infrastructure for Software Product Line (SPL) analysis, designed as a toolset for production and research to support systematic hypothesis exploration and reduce development effort for new experiments.
KernelHaven is an open infrastructure for Software Product Line (SPL) analysis. It is intended both as a production-quality analysis tool set as well as a research support tool, e.g., to support researchers in systematically exploring research hypothesis. For flexibility and ease of experimentation KernelHaven components are plug-ins for extracting certain information from SPL artifacts and processing this information, e.g., to check the correctness and consistency of variability information or to apply metrics. A configuration-based setup along with automatic documentation functionality allows different experiments and supports their easy reproduction. Here, we describe KernelHaven as a product line analysis research tool and highlight its basic approach as well as its fundamental capabilities. In particular, we describe available information extraction and processing plug-ins and how to combine them. On this basis, researchers and interested professional users can rapidly conduct a first set of experiments. Further, we describe the concepts for extending KernelHaven by new plug-ins, which reduces development effort when realizing new experiments.