Feature Interactions: The Next Generation (Dagstuhl Seminar 14281)

The feature-interaction problem is a major threat to modularity and impairs compositional development and reasoning. A feature interaction occurs when the behavior of one feature is affected by the presence of another feature; often it cannot be deduced easily from the behaviors of the individual features involved. The feature-interaction problem became a crisis in the telecommunications industry in the late 1980s, and researchers responded with formalisms that enable automatic detection of feature interactions, architectures that avoid classes of interactions, and techniques for resolving interactions at run-time. While this pioneering work was foundational and very successful, it is limited in the sense that it is based on assumptions that hold only for telecommunication systems. In the meantime, different notions of feature interactions have emerged in different communities, including Internet applications, service systems, adaptive systems, automotive systems, software product lines, requirements engineering, and computational biology. So, feature interactions are a much more general concept than investigated in the past in the context of telecommunication systems, but a classification, comparison, and generalization of the multitude of different views is missing. The feature-interaction problem is still of pivotal importance in various industrial applications, and the Dagstuhl seminar "Feature Interactions: The Next Generation" gathered researchers and practitioners from different areas of computer science and other disciplines with the goal to compare, discuss, and consolidate their views, experience, and domain-specific solutions to the feature-interaction problem.