Feature modeling languages: Denotations and semantic differences

Software Product Lines (SPL) is a Software Engineering approach to systematically reuse software assets in order to produce a family of software products. To represent this set of products and how different features can be assembled SPL frameworks normally offer a Feature Modeling Language. In spite of most of these language share concepts they present several differences. The result of this situation is a contemporary set of dialects with syntax and semantic dissimilarities that hampers interoperability, engineering communication and adoption by practitioners. In this paper we review different SPL approaches focused on Feature Models (FM) to show missed elements in semantic problems. In order to classify them we propose four types of semantic anomalies based on a formal framework coming from philosophy of science. We conclude that most of semantic approaches do not point to real semantic problems. Moreover, most of basic FM's constructs present semantic anomalies.