Understanding Legacy Features with Featureous

Feature-centric comprehension of source code is essential during software evolution. However, such comprehension is oftentimes difficult to achieve due the lack of correspondence between functional features and structural units of object-oriented programs. We present a tool for feature-centric analysis of legacy Java programs called Feature us that addresses this issue. Feature us allows a programmer to easily establish feature-code trace ability links and to analyze their characteristics using a number of visualizations. Feature us is an extension to the Net Beans IDE, and can itself be extended by third-party plugins.