Comparing or configuring products: are we getting the right ones?

Product comparators and configurators aim to assist customers in choosing a product that meets their expectations. While comparators present similarities and differences between competing products, configurators propose an assisted environment to gradually choose and customize products. The two systems have pros and cons and are inherently different. But both share the same variability information background and operate over a set of (possible) products, typically represented through product comparison matrices (PCMs). A key issue is that current PCMs have no clear semantics, making their analysis and transformations imprecise and hard. In this paper, we sketch a research plan for generating dedicated comparators or configurators from PCMs. The core of our vision is the use of formal variability models to encode PCMs and enables a further exploitation by developers of comparators or configurators. We elaborate on five research questions and describe the expected outputs of the research.