Feature Interaction in Software Product Lines

Software product lines (SPL) is considered a key approach for companies interested in improving software development increasing their productivity, quality and reducing costs. In SPL, features define commonalities and variabilities of the products, but they are not independent from each other, since there are interactions among them. These interactions among features can occur in unexpected ways causing impact in a SPL, affecting, for example, the reusable assets.

In this way, conflicts in most of the cases can be dealed during domain analysis phase through a management of feature dependencies. A feature dependency model represents not only static dependencies, but it also represents dynamic relationships and behavior characteristics among features. Additionally, it helps to trace the dependencies and how to configure the products member in a SPL.

Thus, due to the importance to solve this problem in a SPL environment, a systematic review was made to investigate approaches that proposed a solution for this. The main goal of the review was to identify how to classify and represent these dependencies and the guidelines used to identify the interactions to better understand a solution to avoid this problem.

However, some questions remain interesting for discursion: How identify feature interaction in a domain analysis? What activities are necessary? Is it interesting to have standardization on classification of feature interaction to support the dependencies identification among features?