Feature interactions in the global information infrastructure

The international telecommunications system is the world’s largest distributed computing system, offering a wide range of services and service features. Telecommunications service providers are eager to offer new services on this infrastructure, but the development of these new services is hampered by interactions of the service features among the different services. Undetected and undesirable feature interactions cause confusion and dissatisfaction among the users of services and add delay and expense to the development and deployment of new services. This panel reviews the progress that has been made in anticipating and controlling undesirable feature interactions in telecommunications services. This paper sets the stage by discussing the impact of the feature interaction problem on the different phases of the software development lifecycle.