Part of the HyVar consortium is responsible for organizing the Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD). Find it here: http://fosd.net/workshop2016

Abstract

Feature orientation is an emerging paradigm of software development. It supports the automatic generation of large-scale software systems from a set of units of functionality, called features. The key idea of feature-oriented software development (FOSD) is to explicitly represent similarities and differences of a family of software systems for a given application domain (e.g., database systems, banking software, text processing systems) with the goal of reusing software artifacts among the family members. Features distinguish different members of the family by their variable parts. A feature is a unit of functionality that satisfies a requirement, represents a design decision, and provides a potential configuration option. A challenge in FOSD is that a feature does not map cleanly to an isolated module of code. Rather, it may affect (“cut across”) many components/artifacts of a software system. Furthermore, the decomposition of a software system into its features gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of possible feature combinations and interactions. Research on FOSD has shown that the concept of features pervades all phases of the software life cycle and requires a proper treatment in terms of analysis, design, and programming techniques, methods, languages, and tools, as well as formalisms and theory.