Applying Feature Models in Industrial Settings

Abstract

A software product line is a collection of products sharing a common set of features that address the specific needs of a given business. The PRAISE (product-line realization and assessment in industrial settings) project, partly funded by the European Commission under Esprit contract 28651 and pursued by Thomson-CSF/LCR (France), Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany), and the European Software Institute (Spain), is currently investigating product-line realization and its assessment in industrial settings. A part of the project is dedicated to the validation and consolidation of proposed product-line technologies in full-scale industrial experiments. This paper presents the first experimental results obtained by Bosch. The Bosch experiment is located in the car periphery supervision (CPS) domain. One focus has been on feasibility of variability modeling with feature-oriented domain analysis (FODA. The experiment has shown that the FODA model does not provide the necessary expressiveness to represent the different types of crosslinks that are necessary to describe the domain. This paper presents an extension to overcome this shortcoming.