Abstract
Feature modeling has become a popular technique for domain analysis and variability management. However, it is still a considerable challenge to apply this technique to product families and organizational contexts of high complexity like the product range of a global automotive corporation. Managing everything as a single product family with a global feature tree is virtually impossible owing to the enormous complexity, but if the product range is split up into several smaller, independent product lines with separate feature models, systematic reuse and strategic variability management across these portions is lost. In this article, we present multi-level feature trees, which offer a compromise between a single global and several smaller, independent feature trees. Other development artifacts may also be arranged in this way if the multi-level concept is adapted to them. This is shown exemplarily for requirements artifacts in Telelogic Doors. Finally, we describe scenarios showing how this concept can be put into practice.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Asikainen T, Männistö T, Soininen T (2006) A unified conceptual foundadtion for feature modelling. In: 10th International software product line conference (SPLC 2006). doi:10.1109/SPLINE.2006.1691575, pp 31–40
Bittner M, Botorabi A, Poth A, Reiser MO, Weber M (2005) Managing variability and reuse of features and requirements for large and complex organizational structures. In: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE international requirements engineering conference (RE 2005), pp 469–470
Böckle G, Knauber P, Pohl K, Schmid K (2004) Software Produktlinien. dpunkt Verlag
Budinsky F, Steinberg D, Merks E, Ellersick R (2003) Eclipse modeling framework. Addison Wesley, Reading
Bühne S, Lauenroth K, Pohl K (2005) Modelling requirements variability across product lines. In: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE international requirements engineering conference (RE 2005), pp 41–50
Bühne S, Lauenroth K, Pohl K, Weber M (2004) Modeling features for multi-criteria product-lines in automotive industry. In: Proceedings of the workshop on software engineering for automotive systems (SEAS). ICSE 2004
Clements P, Northrop L (2002) Software product lines: practices and patterns. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Collins-Sussman B, Fitzpatrick BW, Pilato CM (2004) Version control with subversion. O’Reilly, Cambridge
Czarnecki K, Eisenecker U (2000) Generative programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Czarnecki K, Helsen S, Eisenecker U (2005) Formalizing cardinality-based feature models and their specialization. Softw Process Improv Practices 10(1):7–29
Czarnecki K, Helsen S, Eisenecker U (2005) Staged configuration through specialization and multi-level configuration of feature models. Softw Process Improv Practices 10(2):143–169
Czarnecki K, Kim CHP (2005) Cardinality-based feature modeling and constraints: a progress report. In: Proceedings of the OOPSLA’05 workshop on software factories
Eclipse foundation web-site. http://www.eclipse.org
Greenfield J, Short K, Cook S, Kent S, Crupi J (2004) Software factories: assembling applications with patterns, models, frameworks, and tools. Wiley, New York
Grimm K (2003) Software technology in an automotive company—major challenges. In: Proceedings of the 25th international conference on software engineering (ICSE 2003). Association for Computing and Machinery & IEEE Computer Society, pp 498–503
Kang KC, Cohen SG, Hess JA, Novak WE, Peterson AS (1990) Feature-oriented domain analysis (foda)—feasibility study. Tech. Rep. CMU/SEI-90-TR-21, Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University
Kang KC, Kim S, Lee J, Kim K, Shin E, Huh M (1998) Form: A feature-oriented reuse method with domain-specific reference architectures. Ann Softw Eng 5:143–168
Kang KC, Lee J, Donohoe P (2002) Feature-oriented product line engineering. IEEE Softw 19:58–65
Object Management Group (OMG): Meta Object Facility (MOF)—Core Specification, Version 2.0 (2006). OMG Document formal/06-01-01
Pohl K, Böckle G, van der Linden F (2005) software product line engineering: foundations, principles and techniques. Springer, Heidelberg
Reiser MO, Weber M (2006) Managing highly complex product families with multi-level feature trees. In: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE international requirements engineering conference (RE 2006). IEEE Computer Society, pp 146–155
Schobbens PY, Heymans P, Trigaux JC, Bontemps Y (2006) Feature diagrams: A survey and a formal semantics. In: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE international requirements engineering conference (RE 2006). IEEE Computer Society, New York, pp 136–145
Thompson JM, Heimdahl MPE (2003) Structuring product family requirements for n-dimensional and hierarchical product lines. Requirements Eng 8(1):42–54
Vesperman J (2006) Essential CVS. O’Reilly, Cambridge
Weber M, Weisbrod J (2002) Requirements engineering in automotive development—experiences and challenges. In: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE international requirements engineering conference (RE 2002). IEEE Computer Society, New York, pp 331–340
Weiss DM, Lai CTR (1999) Software product-line engineering: a family-based software development process. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Stan Bühne, Kim Lauenroth and Klaus Pohl from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Alexander Poth from MB-technology GmbH in Stuttgart and Ali Botorabi, Nikolai Cieslak, Jörg Donandt and Matthias Hoffmann from DaimlerChrysler, Berlin for many fruitful and stimulating discussions on this subject.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Work presented here was performed at TU-Berlin.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Reiser, MO., Weber, M. Multi-level feature trees. Requirements Eng 12, 57–75 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-007-0046-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-007-0046-0