Design of a UML profile for feature diagrams and its tooling implementation

This paper proposes an instrumented approach to integrate feature diagrams with UML models to be used as part of a general approach for designing software product lines and for product generation. The concrete contribution is a new UML pro le based on a meta-model synthesising existing feature diagrams semantics using IBM R ©Rational Software Architect (RSA) implementation. Our feature diagram metamodel integrates consistency checking rules and focuses on a comprehensive, expressive, but not too complex semantics as it aims at helping various domain specialists to express their knowledge with feature diagrams. It is intended to be used in the context of large, complex and multi-domain projects, and at allowing model transformations to derive products. Our RSA implementation makes possible to link feature diagrams with UML model artefacts. It allows traceability between feature models and other di erent kinds of models (requirements, class diagrams, sequence or activity diagrams, etc.).