Automatic Multi-level Feature Tree Construction for Domain-Specific Reusable Artifacts Management

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Main Authors: Jin, Dongming, Jin, Zhi, Li, Nianyu, Yang, Kai, Li, Linyu, Guan, Suijing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jin, Dongming
Jin, Zhi
Li, Nianyu
Yang, Kai
Li, Linyu
Guan, Suijing
author_facet Jin, Dongming
Jin, Zhi
Li, Nianyu
Yang, Kai
Li, Linyu
Guan, Suijing
contents With the rapid growth of open-source ecosystems (e.g., Linux) and domain-specific software projects (e.g., aerospace), efficient management of reusable artifacts is becoming increasingly crucial for software reuse. The multi-level feature tree enables semantic management based on functionality and supports requirements-driven artifact selection. However, constructing such a tree heavily relies on domain expertise, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, this paper proposes an automatic multi-level feature tree construction framework named FTBUILDER, which consists of three stages. It automatically crawls domain-specific software repositories and merges their metadata to construct a structured artifact library. It employs clustering algorithms to identify a set of artifacts with common features. It constructs a prompt and uses LLMs to summarize their common features. FTBUILDER recursively applies the identification and summarization stages to construct a multi-level feature tree from the bottom up. To validate FTBUILDER, we conduct experiments from multiple aspects (e.g., tree quality and time cost) using the Linux distribution ecosystem. Specifically, we first simultaneously develop and evaluate 24 alternative solutions in the FTBUILDER. We then construct a three-level feature tree using the best solution among them. Compared to the official feature tree, our tree exhibits higher quality, with a 9% improvement in the silhouette coefficient and an 11% increase in GValue. Furthermore, it can save developers more time in selecting artifacts by 26% and improve the accuracy of artifact recommendations with GPT-4 by 235%. FTBUILDER can be extended to other open-source software communities and domain-specific industrial enterprises.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automatic Multi-level Feature Tree Construction for Domain-Specific Reusable Artifacts Management
Jin, Dongming
Jin, Zhi
Li, Nianyu
Yang, Kai
Li, Linyu
Guan, Suijing
Software Engineering
With the rapid growth of open-source ecosystems (e.g., Linux) and domain-specific software projects (e.g., aerospace), efficient management of reusable artifacts is becoming increasingly crucial for software reuse. The multi-level feature tree enables semantic management based on functionality and supports requirements-driven artifact selection. However, constructing such a tree heavily relies on domain expertise, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, this paper proposes an automatic multi-level feature tree construction framework named FTBUILDER, which consists of three stages. It automatically crawls domain-specific software repositories and merges their metadata to construct a structured artifact library. It employs clustering algorithms to identify a set of artifacts with common features. It constructs a prompt and uses LLMs to summarize their common features. FTBUILDER recursively applies the identification and summarization stages to construct a multi-level feature tree from the bottom up. To validate FTBUILDER, we conduct experiments from multiple aspects (e.g., tree quality and time cost) using the Linux distribution ecosystem. Specifically, we first simultaneously develop and evaluate 24 alternative solutions in the FTBUILDER. We then construct a three-level feature tree using the best solution among them. Compared to the official feature tree, our tree exhibits higher quality, with a 9% improvement in the silhouette coefficient and an 11% increase in GValue. Furthermore, it can save developers more time in selecting artifacts by 26% and improve the accuracy of artifact recommendations with GPT-4 by 235%. FTBUILDER can be extended to other open-source software communities and domain-specific industrial enterprises.
title Automatic Multi-level Feature Tree Construction for Domain-Specific Reusable Artifacts Management
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03946