Automatic generation of feature models from UML requirement models

Abstract

It is well known that during the domain requirement engineering phase with UML, both feature models and UML notations (e.g. UML use case diagrams and activity diagrams for describing use cases) are necessary. The development in parallel of UML models and a feature model could introduce inconsistencies between such models that should be removed. The construction of UML models for requirements from a feature model is usually a complex task, the generation of UML models from a feature model cannot be automated, and it cannot be expected that UML specialists will construct feature models of high quality; for these reasons we propose in this paper to first develop UML models for requirements and from them to automatically generate a feature model. We have found only a few papers proposing methods for the construction of feature model from UML models for requirements, but these methods do not consider the mapping of use case descriptions, expressed using a UML notation, onto a feature model. In this paper we extend our previous work in requirements engineering of product lines with new kinds of variabilities for use case diagrams, and new stereotypes for classifying activity diagram actions. Additionally, we defined a transformation from these use case diagram and activity diagram notations onto feature model.