Feature Integration in Requirements Engineering
ESPRIT Working Group 23531
ESPRIT Working Group 23531
Until recently the importance of this incremental approach to software
development has been underestimated. In the last few years, however,
the telecommunications industry has identified the notion of feature
as the central one; there, they wish to offer new services by adding
features (such as call forwarding abilities, voice mail facilities,
etc.) to traditional services, and they have identified the `feature
interaction problem' as an important issue. Careful specification
methodologies are required to ensure that features to not interact in
unpredictable and unintuitive ways. The feature interaction problem
means that naive specification of these features will lead to unwanted
interactions between them when they are introduced together.
(For more examples where features and feature interactions may be
relevant, please look at our suggested
case studies.)
Objectives
FIREworks will address the problem of adding features to
specifications of complex software products, in particular software
for telecommunication services and banking. It will provide a
feature-oriented approach to software design including requirements
specification languages and verification logics, as well as a method
for their usage. The aim is to provide a method with which companies
can build products by taking an existing product and adding, removing,
or respecifying some features.
Deliverables
This Working Group will provide a framework for overcoming the
difficulties of manipulating features and studying their interactions.
This has two main strands: upgrading existing specification languages
to enable them to describe feature-oriented systems; and providing
techniques for verifying the specifications. The Working Group will
deliver feature-oriented specification languages (based on several
existing languages). It will also deliver verification
methods for detecting and explaining conflicts between features;
deducing consequences of feature combinations; and methods for
constructing test suites for feature combinations, and providing
typical scenarios. There will also be several case studies assessing
the adequacy of the languages and tools. Further details on
FIREworks are available from the Coordinator: Mark Ryan, School of
Computer Science, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom.
M.D.Ryan@cs.bham.ac.uk.
The proposal. Keywords: features, feature interactions, verification, specification, combining systems.
Cost statement (for FIREworks members to claim expenses)