A Feature-based Approach to Electronic Contracts

E-contracts are used to describe the supply and the consumption details of e-services within a business process. The establishment of e-contracts in a given application domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variation points. This paper proposes a feature-based approach in order to decrease the complexity in e-contract establishment and to foster inter-organizational cooperation. Feature modeling is a technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the software product line context. The feasibility of the approach is shown by a case study carried out within the telecom context and based on experimental software engineering concepts