System families are a form of high level reuse of development assets in a specific problem domain, by making use of commonalities and variabilities. To represent assets belonging to the core of the family and assets belonging to variable parts, feature modeling is a widely used concept. Consistency checking in feature models is not yet addressed appropriately by current methods. This paper gives a brief overview of feature modeling and elaborates the problems of current approaches. Based on the applications of these approaches within an ongoing research project this paper proposes a formalized definition for feature modeling using the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and a set of associations and constraints to be used in the feature model. The relations between features in the feature model and features to external assets are examined and a way to formally handle these relations is presented as a result of a research project.

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For the maintenance of software systems, developers have to completely understand the existing system. The usage of design patterns leads to benefits for new and young developers by enabling them to reuse the knowledge of their experienced colleagues. Design patterns can support a faster and better understanding of software systems. There are different approaches for supporting pattern recognition in existing systems by tools. They are evaluated by the Information Retrieval criteria precision and recall. An automated search based on structures has a highly positive influence on the manual validation of the results by developers. This validation of graphical structures is the most intuitive technique. In this paper a new approach for automated pattern search based on minimal key structures is presented. It is able to detect all patterns described by the GOF [15]. This approach is based on positive and negative search criteria for structures and is prototypically implemented using Rational Rose and Together.

Model driven development has evolved to a mature methodology and technology usable for some industrial settings. Within the automation domain it is an upcoming approach. This paper addresses challenges present in the automation domain when it comes to the usage of model driven development. Quality, life cycle, legacy systems, mental approach and safety challenges are briefly discussed.

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