VariED: an editor for collaborative, real-time feature modeling

Elias Kuiter,Thomas Leich,Gunter Saake,Sebastian Krieter,Jacob Krüger

doi:10.1007/s10664-020-09892-x

Abstract

Feature models are a helpful means to document, manage, maintain, and configure the variability of a software system, and thus are a core artifact in software product-line engineering. Due to the various purposes of feature models, they can be a cross-cutting concern in an organization, integrating technical and business aspects. For this reason, various stakeholders (e.g., developers and consultants) may get involved into modeling the features of a software product line. Currently, collaboration in such a scenario can only be done with face-to-face meetings or by combining single-user feature-model editors with additional communication and version-control systems. While face-to-face meetings are often costly and impractical, using version-control systems can cause merge conflicts and inconsistency within a model, due to the different intentions of the involved stakeholders. Advanced tools that solve these problems by enabling collaborative, real-time feature modeling, analogous to Google Docs or Overleaf for text editing, are missing. In this article, we build on a previous paper and describe (1) the extended formal foundations of collaborative, real-time feature modeling, (2) our conflict resolution algorithm in more detail, (3) proofs that our formalization converges and preserves causality as well as user intentions, (4) the implementation of our prototype, and (5) the results of an empirical evaluation to assess the prototype’s usability. Our contributions provide the basis for advancing existing feature-modeling tools and practices to support collaborative feature modeling. The results of our evaluation show that our prototype is considered helpful and valuable by 17 users, also indicating potential for extending our tool and opportunities for new research directions.

Highlights

Modeling the variability of a configurable platform (i.e., a Software Product Line (SPL)) is essential for an organization to document and manage all implemented software features and to derive valid product configurations that are tailored to different customer requirements (Apel et al 2013a; Pohl et al 2005; Czarnecki et al 2012; Berger et al 2015)
We did identify the strategies for collaborative feature modeling we anticipated, lacking the properties of synchronous, remote collaboration we implemented in our tool
We presented a technique for collaborative, real-time feature modeling and conducted an empirical user study to evaluate the usability and usefulness of our corre

Summary

Introduction

Modeling the variability of a configurable platform (i.e., a Software Product Line (SPL)) is essential for an organization to document and manage all implemented software features and to derive valid product configurations that are tailored to different customer requirements (Apel et al 2013a; Pohl et al 2005; Czarnecki et al 2012; Berger et al 2015). To derive a meaningful variability model that satisfies the defined needs (e.g., representing solution or problem space), all relevant stakeholders must work collaboratively As far as we know, existing tools allow only a single user to edit the model, and multiple users have to rely on direct communication or version-control systems to collaborate. Both of these strategies can have major drawbacks that hamper efficient collaboration during the modeling process. Version-control systems, such as Git, allow the stakeholders to share and edit a variability model at different places and at the same time. Collaborative, real-time variability modeling promises advantages in several use cases, such as:

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Conclusion