Formal modelling of feature configuration workflows

Abstract

In software product line engineering, the configuration process can be a long and complex undertaking that in-volves many participants. When configuration is supported by feature diagrams, two challenges are to modularise the feature diagram into related chunks, and to schedule them as part of the configuration process. Existing work has only focused on the first of these challenges and, for the rest, assumes that feature diagram modules are configured se-quentially. This paper addresses the second challenge. It suggests using YAWL, a state-of-the-art workflow language, to represent the configuration workflow while feature dia-grams model the available configuration options.The prin-cipal contribution of the paper is a new combined formal-ism: feature configuration workflows. A formal semantics is provided so as to pave the way for unambiguous tool speci-fication and safer reasoning about of the configuration pro-cess. The work is motivated and illustrated through a con-figuration scenario taken from the space industry.