Towards supporting feature configuration by interactive visualisation

Adopting a software product line approach allows companies to realise significant improvements in time-to-market, cost, productivity, and system quality. A fundamental problem in software product line engineering is the fact that a product line of industrial size can easily incorporate several thousand variation points. The scale and interdependencies can lead to variability management and product derivation tasks that are extremely complex to manage. This paper presents a metamodel that describes staged feature configuration and introduces a tool that illustrates the advantages of interactive visualisation in managing feature configuration, the first step in a product derivation process.