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On extracting feature models from product descriptions

Published: 25 January 2012 Publication History

Abstract

In product line engineering, domain analysis is the process of analyzing related products to identify their common and variable features. This process is generally carried out by experts on the basis of existing product descriptions, which are expressed in a more or less structured way. Modeling and reasoning about product descriptions are error-prone and time consuming tasks. Feature models (FMs) constitute popular means to specify product commonalities and variabilities in a compact way, and to provide automated support to the domain analysis process. This paper aims at easing the transition from product descriptions expressed in a tabular format to FMs accurately representing them. This process is parameterized through a dedicated language and high-level directives (e.g., products/features scoping). We guarantee that the resulting FM represents the set of legal feature combinations supported by the considered products and has a readable tree hierarchy together with variability information. We report on our experiments based on public data and characterize the properties of the derived FMs.

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VaMoS '12: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software-Intensive Systems
January 2012
193 pages
ISBN:9781450310581
DOI:10.1145/2110147
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 25 January 2012

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