An Empirical Study of Two Software Product Line Tools

In the last decades, software product lines (SPL) have proven to be an efficient software development technique in industries due its capability to increase quality and productivity and decrease cost and time-to-market through extensive reuse of software artifacts. To achieve these benefits, tool support is fundamental to guide industries during the SPL development life-cycle. However, many different SPL tools are available nowadays and the adoption of the appropriate tool is a big challenge in industries. In order to support engineers choosing a tool that best fits their needs, this paper presents the results of a controlled empirical study to assess two Eclipse-based tools, namely FeatureIDE and pure::variants. This empirical study involved 84 students who used and evaluated both tools. The main weakness we observe in both tools are the lack adequate mechanisms for managing the variability, such as for product configuration. As a strength, we observe the automated analysis and the feature model editor.