A Visual Support for Decomposing Complex Feature Models

In Software Product Line (SPL) engineering, Feature Models (FMs) are widely used to capture and manage variability in a sound and organized fashion. Though semantics, notations and reasoning support are well established, maintaining large FMs is still an open problem. As large FMs naturally contain different concerns, some related to domains, others being inherently cross-cutting ones, it is challenging to find a decomposition that will tame this complexity and ease maintenance. This paper presents a visual representation of dependent FMs useful in decomposing a large FM while quantitatively visualizing constraints between and inside them. This Variability Blueprint is intuitive enough to enable the SPL maintainer to confine dependencies between FMs in a small set of identified features inside each decomposed FM. We describe our blueprint and report on its application on two case studies.