Tool support for feature-oriented software development: featureIDE: an Eclipse-based approach

Software program families have a long tradition and will gain momentum in the future. Today’s research tries to move software development to a new quality of industrial production. Several solutions concerning different phases of the software development process have been proposed in order to cope with different problems of program family development. A major problem of program family engineering is still the missing tool support. The vision is an IDE that brings all phases of the development process together consistently and in a user-friendly manner. This paper focuses on AHEAD, a prominent design methodology and architectural model for feature-based program families. We present our first results on developing an Eclipse-based IDE that supports building program families following the AHEAD architecture model. Starting from current weaknesses and pitfalls in implementing program families we outline several challenges of the feature-based development process. Thereupon, we presen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ECLIPSE
• Authors: Thomas Leich, Sven Apel, Laura Marnitz, Gunter Saake
• Keywords: Development Process, ECLIPSE 2005, Program Families, Program Family, Software Engineering