Generic semantics of feature diagrams

  • Authors:

  • Pierre-Yves Schobbens;Patrick Heymans;Jean-Christophe Trigaux;Yves Bontemps

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, University of Namur, 5000 Namur, Belgium;Computer Science Department, University of Namur, 5000 Namur, Belgium;Computer Science Department, University of Namur, 5000 Namur, Belgium;SMALS MvM/eGOV, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Feature Diagrams (FDs) are a family of popular modelling languages used to address the feature interaction problem, particularly in software product lines, FDs were first introduced by Kang as part of the FODA (Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis) method back in 1990. Afterwards, various extensions of FODA FDs were introduced to compensate for a purported ambiguity and lack of precision and expressiveness. However, they never received a formal semantics, which is the hallmark of precision and unambiguity and a prerequisite for efficient and safe tool automation. The reported work is intended to contribute a more rigorous approach to the definition, understanding, evaluation, selection and implementation of FD languages. First, we provide a survey of FD variants. Then, we give them a formal semantics, thanks to a generic construction that we call Free Feature Diagrams (FFDs). This demonstrates that FDs can be precise and unambiguous. This also defines their expressiveness. Many variants are expressively complete, and thus the endless quest for extensions actually cannot be justified by expressiveness. A finer notion is thus needed to compare these expressively complete languages. Two solutions are well-established: succinctness and embeddability, that express the naturalness of a language. We show that the expressively complete FDs fall into two succinctness classes, of which we of course recommend the most succinct. Among the succinct expressively complete languages, we suggest a new, simple one that is not harmfully redundant: Varied FD (VFD). Finally, we study the execution time that tools will need to solve useful problems in these languages.