Considering Feature Interactions in Product Lines: Towards the Automatic Derivation of Dependencies between Product Variants

Employing a software product line presents a systematic approach for the reuse of software assets. This is achieved by the explicit modeling of variability, i.e., the description of points of variation and variants within the development artifacts. To derive concrete products from the reusable assets, dependencies between variants have to be considered when binding the overall variability. Consequently, being aware of the dependencies between variants is essential, as otherwise incorrect products will result. However, determining such dependencies is far from trivial because in reasonably complex systems many such dependencies might have to be elicitated. Therefore, an approach for systematically and semi-automatically deriving variant dependencies from product line assets is introduced in this paper. Upon recognizing that many of the variants can be understood as features, this approach is realized by extending existing solutions for the automatic detection of feature interactions in single products.