Collaborative Product Configuration: Formalization and Efficient Algorithms for Dependency Analysis

In the Software Product Line approach, product configuration is a key activity in which stakeholders choose features for a product. This activity is critical in the sense that careless feature selections might lead to undesirable products. Even though product configuration is seen as a team activity in which divergent interests and views are merged into a single consistent product specification, current configuration technology is essentially single-userbased. This configuration approach can be error-prone and time-consuming as it usually requires numerous interactions between the product manager and the stakeholders to resolve decision conflicts. To tackle this problem we have proposed an approach called “Collaborative Product Configuration” (CPC). In this paper, we extend the CPC approach by providing efficient dependency analysis algorithms to support the validation of workflow-based descriptions called CPC plans. In addition, we add to previous work by providing a formal description of the approach’s concepts, an augmented illustrated example, and a discussion covering several prototype tools now available.