Detecting Dependences and Interactions in Feature-Oriented Design

—Feature-oriented software development (FOSD) aims at the construction, customization, and synthesis of large-scale software systems. We propose a novel software design paradigm, called feature-oriented design, that takes the distinguishing characteristics of FOSD into account, especially the clean and consistent mapping between features and their implementations as well as the tendency of features to interact inadvertently. We extend the lightweight modeling language Alloy with support for featureoriented design and call the extension FeatureAlloy. By means of an implementation and four case studies, we demonstrate how feature-oriented design with FeatureAlloy facilitates separation of concerns, variability, and reuse of models of individual features and helps defining and detecting semantic dependences and interactions between features.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Sven Apel, Wolfgang Scholz, Christian Lengauer, Christian Kästner
• Keywords: Feature-oriented Design, ISSRE 2010, Large-scale Software Systems, Software Design Paradigm, Software Engineering