Feature model driven generation of software artifacts

Abstract

The objective of feature modeling is to foster software reuse by enabling to explicitly and abstractly express commonality and variability in the domain. Feature modeling alone is not sufficient to express all the aspects of the software being developed. Other models and, eventually, code is necessary. These software assets are being configured by the feature model based on the selection of variable features. However, selecting a feature is far from a naive component based approach where feature inclusion would simply mean including the corresponding component. More often than not, feature inclusion affects several places in models or code to be configured requiring their nontrivial adaptation. Feature inclusion recalls transformation and this is at heart of the approach to feature model driven generation of software artifacts proposed in this paper. Features are viewed as solution space transformations that may be executed during the generative process conducted by the feature model configuration.