From Intentions to Decisions: Understanding Stakeholders' Objectives in Software Product Line Configuration

Software Product Line (SPL) engineering promotes the systematic and large-scale reuse of design and implementation artifacts. Feature models are one of the main artefact of SPLE approach which essentially characterize the similar and variant functional and operational specifications of the product family. Given the complexity of the variabilities represented by feature models, it is often hard for the stakeholders to analyze a feature model and identify the features that are most important for their purpose. So, given large-scale software product families, one of the important questions is how and what features should be selected for the target software product from the product family. To address this problem, we adopt concepts from the domain of goal-oriented requirement engineering and base feature selection decisions on software stakeholders’ intentions and expectations. In this work, we propose a framework to automatically map stakeholders’ objectives, which can be captured in the form of goal models, on feature models through the application of semantic analysis methods. Our proposed approach not only provides the means to systematically interrelate feature models and goal models but also helps software practitioners in moving from the stakeholders’ goals and expectations towards domain model feature selection decisions in such a way that a more desirable final product for the stakeholders is developed.