Derivation of subset product lines in FeatureIDE

Abstract

The development and configuration of software product lines can be challenging tasks. During development, engineers often need to focus on a particular subset of features that is relevant for them. In such cases, it would be beneficial to hide other features and their implementation. During product configuration, requirements of potentially multiple stakeholders need to be considered. Therefore, configuration often happens in stages, in which different people contribute configuration decisions for different features. Moreover, in some cases, stakeholders want to share a set of products rather than a specific one. In all these cases, the necessary operation is the same: some features from the product line are assigned a value (e.g., via a partial configuration) while other features remain configurable. In this work, we propose a subset operation that takes a product line and a partial configuration to derive a subset product line comprising only the desired subset of features and implementation artifacts. Furthermore, we present, evaluate, and publish our implementation of the proposed subset operation within the FeatureIDE framework.