FPH: Efficient Non-commutativity Analysis of Feature-Based Systems.

Feature-oriented software development (FOSD) is a promising approach for developing a collection of similar software products from a shared set of software assets. A well-recognized issue in FOSD is the analysis of feature interactions: cases where the integration of multiple features would alter the behavior of one or several of them. Existing approaches to feature interaction detection require a fixed order in which the features are to be composed but do not provide guidance as to how to define this order or how to determine a relative order of a newly-developed feature w.r.t. existing ones. In this paper, we argue that classic feature non-commutativity analysis, i.e., determining when an order of composition of features affects properties of interest, can be used to complement feature interaction detection to help build orders between features and determine many interactions. To this end, we develop and evaluate Mr. Feature Potato Head (FPH) – a modular approach to non-commutativity analysis that does not rely on temporal properties and applies to systems expressed in Java. Our experiments running FPH on 29 examples show its efficiency and effectiveness.