Reviewing Dynamic Feature Location Techniques: Basic Elements and Challenges

Dynamic Feature Location Techniques (DFLTs) seek to pertain the software functionalities artifacts which are known as software features, to the relevant source code based on execution trace. These techniques enhance developers to comprehend a software system to perform various activities such as software maintenance, code refactoring, and others. For instance, comprehend a software application at runtime support the developers to map source code to the relevant software feature based on the feature software execution trace analysis. This work introduces a systematic literature review for several works in DFLTs top. An illustration is presented to show their common structure approach and idealize the used solution on an industrial software application. Moreover, we review their characterization, advantages, disadvantages and administer a possible framework that would be utilized by researchers and developers to boost their decision to opt for the correct DFLTs to solve a problem. A basic comparison between DFLTs is provided by classifying the located techniques into corpus-based analysis, execution trace analysis, and dependencies analysis. The three points of comparison results and the taxonomy diagram lead to examine possible directions for standardizing DFLTs architecture to improve the accuracy and increase the ease of mapping software functionalities to the related software artifact based on the execution trace. The review paper also discusses unsolved issues and defines future directions in the field of Dynamic Feature Location (DFL).