Detecting Dependences and Interactions in Feature-Oriented Design

Abstract—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 char-acteristics of FOSD into account, especially the clean and consis-tent 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 FeatureAlloy. By means of an implementation and four case studies, we demonstrate how feature-oriented design with FeatureAlloy facilitates separation of concerns, variability, and reuse of models of individual features and helps defining and detecting semantic dependences and interactions between features. I