Analyses of a software product line (SPL) typically report variable results that are annotated with logical expressions indicating the set of product variants for which the results hold. These expressions can get complicated and difficult to reason about when the SPL has lots of features and product variants. Previous work introduced a visualizer that supports filters for highlighting the analysis results that apply to product variants of interest, but this work was weakly evaluated. In this paper, we report on a controlled user study that evaluates the effectiveness of this new visualizer in helping the user search variable results and compare the results of multiple variants. Our findings indicate that the use of the new visualizer significantly improves the correctness and efficiency of the user's work and reduces the user's cognitive load in working with variable results.

翻译：针对软件产品线（SPL）的分析通常会产生带逻辑表达式标注的变异性结果，这些逻辑表达式指示了分析结果所适用的产品变体集合。当SPL具有大量特征和产品变体时，这些表达式会变得复杂且难以推理。先前的研究引入了一种支持过滤器的可视化工具，用于高亮显示适用于目标产品变体的分析结果，但该工作仅得到初步评估。本文通过一项受控用户研究，评估了该新型可视化工具在帮助用户搜索变异性结果以及比较多个变体结果方面的有效性。研究结果表明，使用该新型可视化工具显著提升了用户工作的正确性和效率，并降低了用户在处理变异性结果时的认知负荷。