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Supporting multiple perspectives in feature-based configuration

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Abstract

Feature diagrams have become commonplace in software product line engineering as a means to document variability early in the life cycle. Over the years, their application has also been extended to assist stakeholders in the configuration of software products. However, existing feature-based configuration techniques offer little support for tailoring configuration views to the profiles of the various stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, yet formal and flexible, mechanism to leverage multidimensional separation of concerns in feature-based configuration. We propose a technique to specify concerns in feature diagrams and to generate automatically concern-specific configuration views. Three alternative visualisations are proposed. Our contributions are motivated and illustrated through excerpts from a real web-based meeting management application which was also used for a preliminary evaluation. We also report on the progress made in the development of a tool supporting multi-view feature-based configuration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PReCISE Research Centre, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur, Namur, Belgium

    Arnaud Hubaux, Patrick Heymans, Pierre-Yves Schobbens & Ebrahim Khalil Abbasi

  2. INRIA Lille-Nord Europe, Université de Lille 1 - LIFL - CNRS, Lille, France

    Patrick Heymans

  3. Smals vzw, Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Dirk Deridder

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  1. Arnaud Hubaux
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  2. Patrick Heymans
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  3. Pierre-Yves Schobbens
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  4. Dirk Deridder
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  5. Ebrahim Khalil Abbasi
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Correspondence to Arnaud Hubaux.

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Communicated by Robyn Lutz.

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Hubaux, A., Heymans, P., Schobbens, PY. et al. Supporting multiple perspectives in feature-based configuration. Softw Syst Model 12, 641–663 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-011-0220-1

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