Help Annotating Software “HAnS” - Visualisation

Abstract: Developing large software systems that are feature-oriented is a complex and time-consuming task that is further hindered by the recurring and repetitive undertaking of feature lookup. However, feature lookups’ inefficiency can be solved using embedded annotations that quickly and easily allow for recovery of features and their locations. Feature lookup is one of the problems this paper aims to solve by creating a plugin for IntelliJ that enables the use and exploration of feature annotations through multiple visualisations. With this plugin, the user will be able to: visualise where in the code its features are implemented, visualise where the code intersects of two or more features and see useful metrics related to the implemented features. The project results were determined by utilising a user review of the plugin and comparing the completed plugin with predetermined product specifications. While some functionality were not able to be implemented due to limitations in the project, the results achieved suggest that our plugin provides an intuitive and easy way to perform feature lookup. The completed product thus serves as a useful tool to feature based programming for the IDE IntelliJ.