CoFM: a web-based collaborative feature modeling system for internetware requirements' gathering and continual evolution

Internetware is a paradigm of open, decentralized and continually evolvable software systems running on the Internet. In the development of Internetware, the enormous amount of its stakeholders brings challenges to the gathering of common and essential requirements among these stakeholders and continual evolution of the requirements. In this paper, we present a web-based collaborative feature modeling system (CoFM) developed as a platform for gathering, organizing, evaluating, and negotiating Internetware requirements. The basic idea is to express and organize requirements in terms of user-perceivable features of desired Internetware application, and to allow stakeholders to propose, evaluate and negotiate these features collaboratively, in a shared feature model of the application. During the collaboration, the application provider can discover the common and important features that need to be implemented at present, and the special but valuable features that might be provided in the future. Moreover, the provider can track the up-to-moment evolution of the features, which enables the provider to quickly respond to the changes in the Internetware requirements.