A software product line of feature modeling notations and cross-tree constraint languages

Abstract

A Software Product Line (SPL) encompasses a set of closely related software systems in terms of common and variable functionality. On a conceptual level, the entirety of all valid configurations may be captured in a variability model such as a feature model with additional crosstree constraints. Even though variability models are essential for specifying configuration knowledge, various notations for feature models and cross-tree constraints exist, which increases implementation effort when having to realize new tools for a different language. In this paper, we provide remedy to this problem by introducing an SPL to generate different variants of feature modeling notations and cross-tree constraint languages. We base our approach on the state of the art in various works and surveys on feature modeling to create a family of feature modeling notations with similar expressiveness as the original approaches. For our findings, we provide both conceptual configuration knowledge as well as a generative model-based realization. We further demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by generating feature modeling notations similar to those of various publications.