Staged configuration through specialization and multilevel configuration of feature models

By Krzysztof Czarnecki, Simon Helsen, Ulrich W. Eisenecker. Software Process: Improvement and Practice, 2005

529 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Feature modeling is a key technique for capturing commonalities and variabilities in system families and product lines. In this article, we propose a cardinality-based notation for feature modeling, which integrates a number of existing extensions of previous approaches. We then introduce and motivate the novel concept of staged configuration. Staged configuration can be achieved by the stepwise specialization of feature models or by multilevel configuration, where the configuration choices available in each stage are defined by separate feature models. Staged configuration is important because, in a realistic development process, different groups and different people make product configuration choices in different stages. Finally, we also discuss how multilevel configuration avoids a breakdown between the different abstraction levels of individual features. This problem, sometimes referred to as 'analysis paralysis', easily occurs in feature modeling because features can denote entities at arbitrary levels of abstraction within a system family. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76f3775273851a0fd63d260c0567efddfa2b9943

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Citations in the corpus

Automated analysis of feature models 20 years later: A literature review (2010, background): “In addition, other groups of authors have also proposed the inclusion of attributes in feature models [5, 7, 11, 12, 29, 30, 73, 96].”
Feature Models, Grammars, and Propositional Formulas (2005, background): “It is a daunting task to know if two FDs are equivalent; how tools handle redundant representations is left to tool implementors [ 12 ].”
Reasoning about edits to feature models (2009, background): “for the process of deriving configurations of a feature model [13, 14, 25].”
Cool features and tough decisions: a comparison of variability modeling approaches (2012, background): “In FM several authors have proposed approaches to define a set of interrelated feature models, such as multi-level feature models [54, 26].”
Mapping features to models: a template approach based on superimposed variants (2005, methodology): “Feature modeling was originally proposed as part of the Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) method [5], and since then, it has been applied in a range of business and technical domains (see [6] for list of applications with references).”
Formalizing cardinality-based feature models and their specialization (2005, methodology): “In this section, we briefly describe cardinality-based feature modeling as it was proposed by Czarnecki et al. (2004b).”