An eclipse-based feature diagrams toolchain

Feature models are used in software engineering for modeling all the possible configurations of the software of a specific domain. They capture the commonalities and the variabilities among these software and offer a formalism to clearly represent these properties in a separate way. Features represent end-user characteristic of the software and can be optional or mandatory. A selection of a number of these features defines one specific configuration of the software and could be used for example for configuration purpose. Along the years, at least two extensions of the feature models have been proposed in order to improve the original proposal, but only few attempts of providing a set of graphical tools can be found in literature. Moreover some of those are not open source. In this paper we propose a tool chain completely based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework and the Graphical Modeling Framework. It con- sists of: (i) a meta-model that describes the rules for defining feature models, (ii) a graphical tool for creating feature models and defining constraints between the features, (iii) a graphical tool for selecting one possible configuration and checking if it satisfies all the constraints.