Synthesis of attributed feature models from product descriptions

Many real-world product lines are only represented as nonhierarchical collections of distinct products, described by their configuration values. As the manual preparation of feature models is a tedious and labour-intensive activity, some techniques have been proposed to automatically generate boolean feature models from product descriptions. However, none of these techniques is capable of synthesizing feature attributes and relations among attributes, despite the huge relevance of attributes for documenting software product lines. In this paper, we introduce for the first time an algorithmic and parametrizable approach for computing a legal and appropriate hierarchy of features, including feature groups, typed feature attributes, domain values and relations among these attributes. We have performed an empirical evaluation by using both randomized configuration matrices and real-world examples. The initial results of our evaluation show that our approach can scale up to matrices containing 2,000 attributed features, and 200,000 distinct configurations in a couple of minutes.