Feature Binding Analysis for Product Line Component Development

Feature analysis, which provides commonality and variability information of a product line, is essential for product line asset development. Moreover, feature binding information (i.e., when and how product features are included to products and delivered to customers) also drives product line component design. Feature binding can be examined from three perspectives: what features are bound (feature binding unit), when features are bound (feature binding time), and how features are bound (feature binding techniques), and this information must be made available to component design so that composition of components for feature binding becomes feasible. In this paper, we introduce an approach to analyzing feature binding from the three perspectives (i.e., what, when, and how) and illustrate how the analysis results can be used for component development of a product line.