FPH: Efficient Detection of Feature Interactions through Non-Commutativity

Abstract

Feature-oriented software development (FOSD) has recently emerged as a promising approach for developing a collection of similar software products from a shared set of software assets. A well-recognized issue in FOSD is the analysis of feature interactions: cases where the integration of multiple features would alter the behavior of one or several of them. Existing approaches to detecting feature interactions require specification of correctness of individual features and operate on the entire family of software products. In this poster, we develop and evaluate a highly scalable and modular approach, called Mr. Feature Potato Head (FPH), to detect interactions stemming from non-commutativity of features, i.e., cases where behavior of products changes depending on the order in which features have been composed. We instantiate FPH for systems expressed in Java and evaluate its performance on 29 examples. Our experiments show that FPH is an efficient and effective approach for identifying commutativity-related feature interactions.