Configuring Members of a Family of Requirements Using Features

We explicitly consider entire families of software requirements; this enables us to configure family members using features. Our goal is to avoid feature interaction problems by a software engineering approach. Naive feature orientation does not scale due to complexity problems. But we can structure a family of requirements into requirements modules to make it easier to maintain. We then can configure family members from these requirements modules. In this, we must distinguish the notions of a requirements module and of a feature to avoid feature interaction problems. We demonstrate our ideas by adding suitable constructs for families and for features to the formalism Z, and by then specifying a family of LAN message services and a set of features for it.