Aligning software configuration with business and IT context

Abstract

An important activity to maximize Business/IT alignment is selecting a software configuration that fits a given context. Feature models represent the space of software configurations in terms of distinguished characteristics (features). However, they fall short in representing the effect of context on the adoptability and operability of features and, thus, of configurations. Capturing this effect helps to minimize the dependency on analysts and domain experts when deriving a software for a given business and IT environment. In this paper, we propose contextual feature models as a means to explicitly represent and reason about the interplay between the variability of both features and context. We devise a formal framework and automated analyses which enable to systematically derive products aligned with an organizational context. We also propose FM-Context, a support tool for modeling and analysis. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.