Section: New Results

Support for Reverse Engineering and Maintaining Feature Models

Feature Models (FMs) are a popular formalism for modelling and reasoning about commonality and variability of a system. In essence, FMs aim to define a set of valid combinations of features, also called configurations. In [35] , we tackle the problem of synthesising an FM from a set of configurations. The main challenge is that numerous candidate FMs can be extracted from the same input configurations, yet only a few of them are meaningful and maintainable. We first characterise the different meanings of FMs and identify the key properties allowing to discriminate between them. We then develop a generic synthesis procedure capable of restituting the intended meanings of FMs based on inferred [72] or user-specified knowledge. Using tool support, we show how the integration of knowledge into FM synthesis can be realized in different practical application scenarios that involve reverse engineering and maintaining FMs.