FST Graduate Research Topic

Research Topic: Prioritization in Software Product Line Feature Models
Suggested By: Ebrahim Bagheri
Last Update: February 6th, 2010

The quality of a software product line feature model product depends on how well the preferences of the stakeholders have been satisfied in it. It is hence important to select the features that satisfy both hard and soft preferences of the stakeholders and also their functional and non-functional requirements. In many cases, the interpretation of the stakeholder requests turns into an unsatisfiable situation where all of the requested features cannot be simultaneously selected together due to their integrity constraints. For instance, one feature needs to be removed once another feature is selected and so they cannot appear together although being requested by the stakeholders. In other words, features of a feature model have interactions with each other. For this reason, a feature prioritization framework needs to be developed that interacts with the stakeholders? requirements and provides a rank-order over the desirable but mutually exclusive features. It is desirable that an investigation on different existing prioritization techniques is performed, in order to extract the most important characteristics that a feature model prioritization technique must possess. This project will be done in the AU semantic technologies lab under the supervision of both Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri and Dr. Dragan Gasevic as well as in collaboration with an energetic team of postdoctoral fellows and PhD students associated with this lab.