Measures to report the Location Problem of Model Fragment Location

Model Fragment Location (MFL) aims at identifying model elements that are relevant to a requirement, feature, or bug. Many MFL approaches have been introduced in the last few years to address the identification of the model elements that correspond to a specific functionality. However, there is a lack of detail when the measurements about the search space (models) and the measurements about the solution to be found (model fragment) are reported. Generally, the only reported measure is the model size. In this paper, we propose using five measurements (size, volume, density, multiplicity, and dispersion) to report the location problems. These measurements are the result of analyzing 1,308 MFLs in a family of industrial models over the last four years. Using two MFL approaches, we emphasize the importance of these measurements in order to compare results. Our work not only proposes improving the reporting of the location problem, but it also provides real measurements of location problems that are useful to other researchers in the design of synthetic location problems.