A new parameter for product configuration in software product lines

Software product line development is a new software engineering method. It promotes the predictive software reuse by developing similar software systems together. One of the key artifacts of a software product line is the feature model, which represents the commonality and variability of all the products in the product family. When developing a member product from the product line, based on the requirement of the final product, features from the feature model will be selected and configured to form the final product. As the requirement could be incomplete or vague, the software engineer might need additional information in assisting with the feature selection. In this paper, we propose a new parameter, called the instantiation space, which measures the relative impact on the rest of the system for a selection. We believe that such information will be very helpful in the process of product configuration.