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Feature model extraction from large collections of informal product descriptions

Published: 18 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Feature Models (FMs) are used extensively in software product line engineering to help generate and validate individual product configurations and to provide support for domain analysis. As FM construction can be tedious and time-consuming, researchers have previously developed techniques for extracting FMs from sets of formally specified individual configurations, or from software requirements specifications for families of existing products. However, such artifacts are often not available. In this paper we present a novel, automated approach for constructing FMs from publicly available product descriptions found in online product repositories and marketing websites such as SoftPedia and CNET. While each individual product description provides only a partial view of features in the domain, a large set of descriptions can provide fairly comprehensive coverage. Our approach utilizes hundreds of partial product descriptions to construct an FM and is described and evaluated against antivirus product descriptions mined from SoftPedia.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ESEC/FSE 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
    August 2013
    738 pages
    ISBN:9781450322379
    DOI:10.1145/2491411
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    Published: 18 August 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. Domain Analysis
    2. Feature Models
    3. Product Lines

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