Concerns and their separation in feature diagram languages: An informal survey

Feature diagrams describe valid configurations of features in a software product line. A major limitation of current feature diagram languages is that they are found not to scale well when applied to realistic software product lines: feature diagrams quickly become too complex to be understood by engineers, and too vague to be analysed by reasoning tool. One well-known design principle for managing complexity is the separation of concerns. However, the nature of important concerns in software product line development, and the extent to which the separation of concerns is addressed by current feature diagram languages are not clear. In this paper, we report on our initial survey of important concerns considered by feature diagram languages and guidelines for addressing those concerns. Keywords-Software Product Line; Feature Diagrams; Separation of Concerns; Survey;