Towards product configuration taking into account quality concerns

Abstract

The configuration of concrete products from a product line infrastructure is the process of resolving the variability captured in the product line according to a company's market strategy or specific customer's requirements. Several aspects influence the selection of features for a concrete product, such as dependencies and constraints between features, the different stakeholders involved in the process, the desired degree of quality, and cost constraints. This paper presents the vision of a configurator that will focus on providing indicators of security and performance for features and empowering its users to interactively observe the effect of the selected set of features on these two quality characteristics. We propose the use of reusable expert knowledge and static analysis for obtaining the indicators of security and performance, respectively. The two main issues to be investigated are: (1) to which degree the configuration process should be automated; and (2) how exactly to obtain indicators of security and performance for features that can be used to predict the security and performance of whole configurations.