Detecting Dependences and Interactions in Feature-Oriented Design

Feature-oriented software development (FOSD) aims at the construction, customization, and synthesis of large-scale software systems. We propose a novel software design paradigm, called feature-oriented design, that takes the distinguishing characteristics of FOSD into account, especially the clean and consistent mapping between features and their implementations as well as the tendency of features to interact inadvertently. We extend the lightweight modeling language Alloy with support for feature-oriented design and call the extension Feature Alloy. By means of an implementation and four case studies, we demonstrate how feature-oriented design with Feature Alloy facilitates separation of concerns, variability, and reuse of models of individual features and helps defining and detecting semantic dependences and interactions between features.