Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development

• Authors: Sven Apel;William R. Cook;Krzysztof Czarnecki;Christian Kastner;Neil Loughran;Oscar Nierstrasz
• Venue: 1st International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development
• Year: 2009

Feature orientation is an emerging paradigm of software development. It supports the largely automatic generation of large software systems from a set of units of functionality, so-called features. The key idea of feature-oriented software development (FOSD) is to emphasize the similarities of a family of software systems for a given application domain (e.g., database systems, banking software, text processing systems) with the goal of reusing software artifacts among the family members. Features distinguish different members of the family. For example, features of a database system could be transaction management, query optimization, and multi-user operation, those of a banking software could be account management, authentication, and financial transactions, and those of a text processing system could be printing, spell checking, and document format conversion. A challenge in FOSD is that a feature does not map cleanly to an isolated module of code. Rather it may affect ("cut across") many components/documents of a modular software system. For example, the feature transaction management would affect many parts of a database system, e.g., query processing, logical and physical optimization, and buffer and storage management. Research on FOSD has shown that the concept of features pervades all phases of the software life cycle and requires a proper treatment in terms of analysis, design, and programming techniques, methods, languages, and tools, as well as formalisms and theory. The main goal of the FOSD'09 workshop is to foster and strengthen the collaboration between the different researchers who work in the field of FOSD or in the related fields of software product lines, aspect-oriented software development, service-oriented architecture, and model-driven engineering. A keynote by Don Batory, a leading researcher in FOSD, will be an excellent start up for discussions on historical perspectives, current issues, and visions of FOSD. The FOSD workshop builds on the success of a series of workshops on product lines, generative programming, and aspect orientation, held at GPCE'06, GPCE'07, and GPCE'08. In the predecessor workshops it became apparent that the concept of features and the paradigm of FOSD is central to the thinking of a whole community and is related to the concepts found in different other communities. So, the idea grew to dedicate a workshop specifically to FOSD in order to set a proper focus. Furthermore, four of the organizers of this workshop (Sven Apel, William R. Cook, Krzysztof Czarnecki, and Oscar Nierstrasz) are organizing a research seminar on FOSD at the renowned Dagstuhl castle. The seminar proposal has recently been accepted by Dagstuhl castle and the seminar will take place in January 2011. So, a further motivation for the FOSD workshop is the idea to hold the workshop at MODELS/GPCE/SLE 2009 as a kick-off meeting for the FOSD Dagstuhl Seminar.