Exploring Feature Interactions in the Wild: The New Feature-Interaction Challenge

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (S. Apel, S. Kolesnikov, N. Siegmund, C. Kästner, B. Garvin)
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:41:39 -0500

Sven Apel, Sergiy S. Kolesnikov, Norbert Siegmund, Christian Kästner, and Brady Garvin. Exploring Feature Interactions in the Wild: The New Feature-Interaction Challenge. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), pages 1--8, New York, NY: ACM Press, October 2013.

The feature-interaction problem has been keeping researchers and practitioners in suspense for years. Although there has been substantial progress in developing approaches for modeling, detecting, managing, and resolving feature interactions, we lack sufficient knowledge on the kind of feature interactions that occur in real-world systems. In this position paper, we set out the goal to explore the nature of feature interactions systematically and comprehensively, classified in terms of order and visibility. Understanding this nature will have significant implications on research in this area, for example, on the efficiency of interaction-detection or performance-prediction techniques. A set of preliminary results as well as a discussion of possible experimental setups and corresponding challenges give us confidence that this endeavor is within reach but requires a collaborative effort of the community.