Foundations of Collaborative, Real-Time Feature Modeling

Feature models are core artifacts in software-product-line engineering to manage, maintain, and configure variability. Feature modeling can be a cross-cutting concern that integrates technical and business aspects of a software system. Consequently, for large systems, a team of developers and other stakeholders may be involved in the modeling process. In such scenarios, it can be useful to utilize collaborative, real-time feature modeling, analogous to collaborative text editing in Google Docs or Overleaf. However, current techniques and tools only support a single developer to work on a model at a time. Collaborative and simultaneous editing of the same model is often achieved by using version control systems, which can cause merge conflicts and do not allow immediate verification of a model, hampering real-time collaboration outside of face-to-face meetings. In this paper, we describe the formal foundations of collaborative, real-time feature modeling, focusing on concurrency control by synchronizing multiple actions of collaborators in a distributed network. We further report on preliminary results, including an initial prototype. Our contribution provides the basis for extending feature-modeling tools to enable advanced collaborative feature modeling and integrate it with related tasks.