Supporting Multiple Perspectives in Feature-based Configuration: Foundations

[Context & motivation] Feature diagrams have become commonplace in software product line engineering as a means to document variability early in the lifecycle. Over the years, their application span has also been extended to assist stakeholders in the configuration of software products. [Question/problem] However, existing feature-based configuration techniques offer little support for tayloring configuration views to the profiles of the various stakeholders. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we propose a lightweight, yet formal and flexible, mechanism to leverage multidimensional separation of concerns in feature-based configuration. [Contribution] We propose a technique to specify concerns in feature diagrams and to generate automatically concern-specific configuration views. Three alternative visualisations are proposed. Our contributions are motivated and illustrated through excerpts of a real web-based meeting management application which was also used for a preliminary evaluation.