International audienceIn the scientific community, feature models are the de-facto standard for representing variability in software product line engineering. This is different from industrial settings where they appear to be used much less frequently. We and other authors found that in a number of cases, they lack concision, naturalness and expressiveness. This is confirmed by industrial experience. When modelling variability, an efficient tool for making models intuitive and concise are feature attributes. Yet, the semantics of feature models with attributes is not well understood and most existing notations do not support them at all. Furthermore, the graphical nature of feature models' syntax also appears to be a barrier to industrial adoption, both psychological and rational. Existing tool support for graphical feature models is lacking or inadequate, and inferior in many regards to tool support for text-based formats. To overcome these shortcomings, we designed TVL, a text-based feature modelling language. In terms of expressiveness, TVL subsumes most existing dialects. The main goal of designing TVL was to provide engineers with a human-readable language with a rich syntax to make modelling easy and models natural, but also with a formal semantics to avoid ambiguity and allow powerful automation
Nowadays, mass customization has been embraced by a large portion of the industry. As a result, the web abounds with sales configurators that help customers tailor all kinds of goods and services to their specific needs. In many cases, configurators have become the single entry point for placing customer orders. As such, they are strategic components of companies' information systems and must meet stringent reliability, usability and evolvability requirements. However, the state of the art lacks guidelines and tools for efficiently engineering web sales configurators. To tackle this problem, empirical data on current practice is required. The first part of this paper reports on a systematic study of 111 web sales configurators along three essential dimensions: rendering of configuration options, constraint handling, and configuration process support. Based on this, the second part highlights good and bad practices in engineering web sales configurator. The reported quantitative and qualitative results open avenues for the elaboration of methodologies to (re-)engineer web sales configurators.
Feature cardinalities in feature diagrams determine the number of times a feature and its subtree can be duplicated during configuration by an operation named "cloning".Other authors already investigated the problem and published different proposals of semantics for this construct. However, this previous work is not easily amenable to the formal study of the various properties of feature diagrams and their derived configurations. Also, cross-tree constraint languages still need to be properly extended to account for feature cardinalities.This paper presents an extension of an earlier formal semantics of feature diagrams by adding support for feature cardinalities.
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