Structural feature interaction patterns: case studies and guidelines

  • Authors:

  • Sven Schuster;Sandro Schulze;Ina Schaefer

  • Affiliations:

  • Technische Universität Braunschweig;Technische Universität Braunschweig;Technische Universität Braunschweig

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

Feature interactions have been an intensive field of research for more than a decade. Recently, it gained much attention in the context of software product lines (SPLs), a methodology that takes features explicitly into account to distinguish between similar yet different programs. In its very essence, feature interactions occur whenever the presence of two or more features leads to a considerable (and maybe unwanted) change of the behavior of the underlying program. Amongst others, feature interactions may occur on source code level, for example, in form of additional code that is needed due to interacting features. In this paper, we focus on such structural interactions. Particularly, we investigate structural feature interaction patterns, that is, patterns that are related to structural feature interactions, and vice versa. To this end, we propose an approach to detect design patterns in feature-oriented SPLs. We show that such design patterns exist on feature level and these patterns involve feature interactions. Based on our results, we reason about feature interactions in the presence of design patterns. Particularly, we show when feature interactions occur and that they are beneficial, for example, to achieve a higher degree of abstraction. Furthermore, we propose an initial guideline when certain design patterns are applicable.