Variation Management for Software Product Lines with Cumulative Coverage of Feature Interactions

Abstract

In this paper we present a practical way for managing software product lines with respect to its feature interactions and illustrate how it works with the results from the real products in our previous experience. In front of this work, we have applied a software product line engineering and model driven development to our product line development, in which we have ever developed more than 30 products by assembling software components without hand coding. In this previous experience, we found that product developers tended to make excessive effort on verification and testing because of the fear of feature interaction problems. This prevented improving the productivity of software development. In order to address this issue, we propose accumulating the results of feature interactions that have ever appeared in the past products so that the product developers can focus their testing effort on interactions that first appear in their product without worrying about the implementation details. Then they will have confidence in their product configuration. We believe that the variation management with respect to the feature interactions will encourage the developers and promote the introduction of software product line engineering.