Feature location benchmark with ArgoUML SPL

Feature location is a traceability recovery activity to identify the implementation elements associated to a characteristic of a system. Besides its relevance for software maintenance of a single system, feature location in a collection of systems received a lot of attention as a first step to re-engineer system variants (created through clone-and-own) into a Software Product Line (SPL). In this context, the objective is to unambiguously identify the boundaries of a feature inside a family of systems to later create reusable assets from these implementation elements. Among all the case studies in the SPL literature, variants derived from ArgoUML SPL stands out as the most used one. However, the use of different settings, or the omission of relevant information (e.g., the exact configurations of the variants or the way the metrics are calculated), makes it difficult to reproduce or benchmark the different feature location techniques even if the same ArgoUML SPL is used. With the objective to foster the research area on feature location, we provide a set of common scenarios using ArgoUML SPL and a set of utils to obtain metrics based on the results of existing and novel feature location techniques.