What Happened to Our Features? Visualization and Understanding of Scope Change Dynamics in a Large-Scale Industrial Setting

When developing software platforms for product lines, decisions on which features to implement are affected by factors such as changing markets and evolving technologies. Effective scoping thus requires continuous assessment of how changes in the domain impact scoping decisions. Decisions may have to be changed as circumstances change, resulting in a dynamic evolution of the scope of software asset investments. This paper presents an industrial case study in a large-scale setting where a technique called feature survival charts for visualization of scoping change dynamics has been implemented and evaluated in three projects. The evaluation demonstrated that the charts can effectively focus investigations of reasons behind scoping decisions, valuable for future process improvements. A set of scoping measurements is also proposed, analyzed theoretically and evaluated empirically with data from the cases. The conclusions by the case company practitioners are positive, and the solution is integrated with their current requirements engineering measurement process.