On extracting feature models from product descriptions

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.

Composing Your Compositions of Variability Models

“…We discussed the benefits and drawbacks of each variant using different criteria: the quality of the resulting FM, its customizability, as well as the provided capability of reasoning over the FM and of composing different implementations together. Different practical scenarios of use [6,8,12,24,38] were presented and a reading grid synthesizes these findings, in the aim of assisting developers choosing and implementing the right compositions. Our immediate concern is to address one of the challenges opened by our contribution: the impact of the FM composition over the related modeling assets.…”

“…Devising web configurators from product descriptions In [12], we extract FMs from product descriptions with the ultimate goal of devising product configurators. In this scenario the requirements are as follows.…”

“…a feature hierarchy) for the organizations. The same situation arises when extracting FMs from different software artifacts [12,[17][18][19]. However these various usages necessitate different interpretations of the FM composition operation to reflect the captured variable assets.…”

“…A variety of models may be used for different development activities and artifacts -ranging from requirements, source codes, certifications and tests to user interfaces. In an increasing number of scenarios, support for composing models and their variability is becoming more and more crucial [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

On Extracting Feature Models from Sets of Valid Feature Combinations

“…al proposed a procedure to extract feature models from product descriptions [13]. Their reverse engineering algorithm operates on a slightly different perspective than ours does.…”