Feature grouping using the abstract behavioral specification language

Abstract

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) aims to produce variant-rich software with features based on diverse user requirements. SPLE uses the term feature to express system commonalities and variabilities. The Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) is an executable modeling language that supports SPLE. It uses feature models to declare and organize software variability as a tree of nested features. Users select the specific features they need based on this feature model. Such a selection process can be a too complex task if the number of features is quite large. In this research we propose to apply a grouping mechanism to the features of a feature model in order to reduce the complexity of the feature selection performed by the user. Using this mechanism the user selects the features in a software product based on groups instead of the more complex original feature model structure. We implemented the grouping mechanism as part of the ABS tool suite. The resulting groups are visualized using a simple web application. Case studies were employed to evaluate the proposed grouping mechanism.