Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development

Abstract

Feature orientation is an emerging paradigm of software development. It supports the automatic generation of large-scale software systems from a set of units of functionality called features. The key idea of feature-oriented software development (FOSD) is to emphasize the similarities of a family of software systems for a given application domain (e.g., database systems, banking software, text processing systems) with the goal of reusing software artifacts among the family members. Features distinguish different members of the family. A feature is a unit of functionality that satisfies a requirement, represents a design decision, and provides a potential configuration option. A challenge in FOSD is that a feature does not map cleanly to an isolated module of code. Rather it may affect («cut across») many components/artifacts of a software system. Furthermore, the decomposition of a software system into its features gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of possible feature combinations and interactions. Research on FOSD has shown that the concept of features pervades all phases of the software life cycle and requires a proper treatment in terms of analysis, design, and programming techniques, methods, languages, and tools, as well as formalisms and theory. The goal of the workshop is to foster and strengthen the collaboration between the researchers and practitioners who work in the field of FOSD or in the related fields of software product lines, service-oriented architecture, model-driven engineering and feature interactions. The workshop's focus is on discussions, rather than on presenting technical content only. FOSD'14 was scheduled for one full day. After the keynote by Jo Atlee, the day was divided into two sessions. In the Research session, accepted research papers were presented. To stimulate discussions, each paper was assigned a "devil's advocate," who was supposed to prepare a set of one to three controversial questions, and to step into the discussion when appropriate. The FOSD in Practice session comprised practice-oriented "tech talks" that present or demonstrate the application of FOSD and respective technologies (methods, tools, analyses).