An Evaluation to Compare Software Product Line Decision Model and Feature Model.

A key issue in defining a product line is specifying the allowable set of products that will be produced using product line assets, i.e., the scope of the domain. This paper conducts an evaluation to compare two different approaches for defining domain scope, decision model as defined in the Family-oriented Abstraction, Specification, Translation (FAST) process and the feature model as defined in the Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) process. The comparison is based on applying the approaches to two examples, one a textbook example and the other to a product line we maintain on an open source website, in order to identify guidelines for improving the identification and representation of a software family. Our conclusion is that decision model includes both commonality and variability definition at software architecture level and thus it is more suitable for larger product line with a significant number of commonality and variability.