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Feature models (FMs) are widely used to describe software product lines (SPL). They specify common and variation points in the domain of the SPL. Because of their wide domain coverage, FM development requires extensive domain analysis and important domain expertise that is often hard to acquire. These development requirements motivated us to propose, in this paper, a top-down method that extracts automatically an FM from functional requirements of product variants. Besides its automation, its novelty stems from the use of semantic information mined through natural language processing techniques to extract potential features from each product variant. To account for name variations, our method harmonizes the names of the features extracted from the product variants by using a classification technique to group similar features. In addition, to determine the feature type, it uses the formal concept analysis technique to distinguish mandatory from optional features. Furthermore, to structure the FM, it uses a set of semantic criteria to determine the constraints among the features. The paper reports on a quantitative and a comparative evaluation of the method on existing FMs, and it examines the conformity of the generated FMs to the input functional requirements, based on experts' feedbacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Finite State Machines (FFSMs) were proposed as a modeling formalism that represents the abstract behavior of an entire software product line (SPL). Several model-based testing techniques have been developed to support test case generation for SPL specifications, but none support the full fault coverage criterion for SPLs at the family-wide level. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Harmonized State Identifiers (HSI) method, an FSM-based testing method supporting full fault coverage. By extending the HSI method for FFSMs, we are able to generate a single configurable test suite for groups of SPL products that can be instantiated using feature constraints. We implement a graphical tool named ConFTGen to guide the design, validation, derivation and test case generation for state, transition and full fault coverage of FFSMs. Experimental results indicate a reduction of approximately 50% on the number of test cases required to test 20 random SPL products. Also, we investigate the applicability of our method by applying it to a case study from the automotive domain, namely the Body Comfort System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In software product lines development, it is sometimes important to provide a flexible binding time for features such that developers can choose between static or dynamic feature activation. For example, software products designed for devices with constrained resources may use a static binding time to avoid the performance overhead introduced by dynamic binding time activation. However, other devices can exploit binding time flexibility to support products with a dynamic binding time for some of their features. To implement this kind of flexibility in a modular way, we can define AspectJ-based idioms. Researchers have proposed Edicts, an idiom based on AspectJ and design patterns. In this article, we argue that this idiom leads to an increase in code duplication, scattering, tangling and size, which can hamper code reuse, maintenance and understanding. To mitigate such issues, this paper proposes three idioms based on aspect-oriented programming to implement flexible feature binding. We apply our three idioms, along with Edicts, to implement a flexible binding time for features in four different applications. By doing so, we were able to assess the resulting implementations by using software metrics that judge code-quality factors. Our evaluation suggests that our idioms reduce the above-mentioned problems when implementing flexible feature binding for the selected features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]