Feature-oriented software development 

Abstract: Developing and maintaining a feature model is a tedious process and gets increasingly difficult with regard to large product lines consisting of thousands of features and constraints. In addition, these large-scale feature models typically involve several stakeholders from different domains during development and maintenance. We aim at supporting such stakeholders by deriving and explaining implicit constraints for partial feature models. A partial feature model can either be a submodel of a feature model representing the full product line or a specific feature model in a set of interrelated models. For every implicit constraint, we generate an explanation exposing which other model parts and constraints interfere with the partial model of interest. Thus, stakeholders are only confronted with a small part of the feature model reducing the complexity while preserving the necessary information about dependencies. Our approach is implemented in the open-source framework FeatureIDE.

Abstract: A complete understanding of evolution of variability requires analysis over all project spaces that contain it: source code, build system and the variability model. Aiming at better understanding of how complex variant-rich software evolve, we set to study one, the Linux kernel, in detail. We qualitatively analyze a number of evolution steps in the kernel history and present our findings as a preliminary sample of a catalog of evolution patterns. Our patterns focus on how the variability evolves when features are removed from the variability model, but are kept as part of the software. The identified patterns relate changes to the variability model, the build system, and implementation code. Despite preliminary, they already indicate evolution steps that have not been captured by prior studies, both empirical and theoretical.

Abstract: Model-driven development is a well-known practice in modern software engineering. Many tools exist which allow developers to build software in a model-based or even model-driven way, but they do not provide dedicated support for software product line development. Only recently some approaches combined model-driven engineering and software product line engineering. In this paper we present an approach that allows for combining feature models and Ecore-based domain models and provides extensive support to keep the mapping between the involved models consistent. Our key contribution is a declarative textual language which allows to phrase domain-specific consistency constraints which are preserved during the configuration process in order to ensure context-sensitive syntactical correctness of derived domain models.

Abstract: Industries that successfully apply product line approaches often operate in markets that are well established and have a strategic perspective. Consequently, such organizations have a tendency towards long-term planning of products and product lines. Although there are numerous approaches for efficient product line engineering, there is surprisingly little support for a long-term, strategic perspective and an evolution of product lines. To address these challenges, we aim to integrate evolution into model-driven product line engineering. In particular, we explore how feature models can be applied to describe the evolution of product lines. The paper contributes (i) concepts for describing the evolution of product lines with feature models, (ii) a corresponding framework, which puts this into a bigger context and (iii) three scenarios that show how this framework can be applied. The concepts are motivated with examples from automotive software engineering and embedded systems, which are industries with a strong affinity to product lines, where long term planning of the product portfolio are common strategies.