FeatureIDE: Tool Framework for Feature-Oriented Software Development

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (C. Kästner, T. Thüm, G. Saake, J. Feigenspan, T. Leich, F. Wielgorz, S. Apel)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Christian Kästner, Thomas Thüm, Gunter Saake, Janet Feigenspan, Thomas Leich, Fabian Wielgorz, and Sven Apel. FeatureIDE: Tool Framework for Feature-Oriented Software Development. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), ISBN 978-1-4244-3452-7, pages 611--614, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, May 2009. Formal Demonstration paper.

Tools support is crucial for the acceptance of a new programming language. However, providing such tool support is a huge investment that can usually not be provided for a research language. With FeatureIDE, we have built an IDE for AHEAD that integrates all phases of featureoriented software development. To reuse this investment for other tools and languages, we refactored FeatureIDE into an open source framework that encapsulates the common ideas of feature-oriented software development and that can be reused and extended beyond AHEAD. Among others, we implemented extensions for FeatureC++ and FeatureHouse, but in general, FeatureIDE is open for everybody to showcase new research results and make them usable to a wide audience of students, researchers, and practitioners.