FCA for software product line representation: Mixing configuration and feature relationships in a unique canonical representation

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a software engineering domain in which families of similar softwares (called products) are built reusing common artifacts. This requires to analyze common-alities and variabilities, for example to detect which parts are common to several products and which parts differ from one product to another. Such software characteristics that may be present or not in a product are called features. Several approaches in the literature exist to organize features and product configurations in terms of features. In this paper we review those approaches and show that concept lattices are a relevant structure to organize features and product configurations. We also address scaling issues related to formal context computation in the domain of SPLE.

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