Collaborative and Coordinated Product Configuration

Product configuration is a key activity of product engineering that regards the constrained combination and parameterization of product line assets as a means to achieve correct software specification. Current product configuration approaches frequently rely on the application engineer to translate user requirements into correct configuration choices. This process is error-prone and risky as requirements may lead to conflicting decisions at configuration time. Indeed, we deem that an important aspect of product configuration has long been neglected: its collaborative nature. In our research, we advocate that product configuration is enhanced by a collaborative perspective, providing that conflicting scenarios are properly handled. We propose an approach to support collaborative and coordinated product configuration by promoting processes to first-order elements for the explicit guidance of configuration decisions. We provide insights on important coordination issues and introduce an algorithm to derive process models from annotated feature models to illustrate the approach's feasibility.