Goal-driven software product line engineering

Feature Models encapsulate functionalities and quality properties of a product family. The employment of feature models for managing variability and commonality of large-scale product families raises an important question: on what basis should the features of a product family be selected for a target software application, which is going to be derived from the product family. Thus, the selection of the most suitable features for a specific application requires the understanding of its stakeholders' intentions and also the relationship between their intentions and the available software features. To address this important issue, we adopt a standard goal-oriented requirements engineering framework, i.e., the i*framework, for identifying stakeholders' intentions and propose an approach for explicitly mapping and bridging between the features of a product family and the goals and objectives of the stakeholders. We propose a novel approach to automatically preconfigure a given feature model based on the objectives of the target product stakeholders. Also, our approach is able to elucidate the rationale behind the selection of the most important features of a family for a target application.