Cardinality-Based Feature Modeling and Constraints: A Progress Report

Software factories have been proposed as a comprehensive and integrative approach to generative software development. Feature modeling has several applications in generative software development, including domain analysis, product-line scoping, and feature-based product specification. This paper reports on our recent progress in cardinalitybased feature modeling and its support for expressing additional constraints. We show that the Object-Constraint Language (OCL) can adequately capture such constraints. Furthermore, we identify a set of facilities based on constraint satisfaction that can be provided by feature modeling and feature-based configuration tools and present a prototype implementing some of these facilities. We report on our experience with the prototype and give directions for future work.