Software Variability Management: An Exploratory Study with Two Feature Modeling Tools

Software Product Line (SPL) is becoming widely adopted in industry due to its capability of minimizing costs and improving quality of software systems through systematic reuse of software artifacts. An SPL is a set of software systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfies the specific needs of a particular market segment. A feature represents an increment in functionality relevant to some stakeholders. There are several tools to support variability management by modeling features in SPL. However, it is hard for a developer to choose the most appropriate feature modeling tool due to the several options available. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study aiming to support SPL engineers choosing the feature modeling tool that best fits their needs. This exploratory study compares and analyzes two feature modeling tools, namely FeatureIDE and SPLOT, based on data from 56 participants that used the analyzed tools. In this study, we performed a four-dimension qualitative analysis with respect to common functionalities provided by feature modeling tools: (i) Feature Model Editor, (ii) Automated Analysis of Feature Models, (iii) Product Configuration, and (iv) Tool Notation. The main issues we observed in SPLOT are related to its interface. FeatureIDE, on the other hand, revealed some constraints when creating feature models.