Sven Apel
Talk: The New Feature Interaction Challenge
- Date and Time
- December 06, 2016 at 3:30pm
- Location
Abstract
Feature interactions are a major threat to software modularity and impair compositional development and reasoning. A feature interaction occurs when the behavior of one feature is affected by the presence of another feature. Usually, interactions 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 1980s, when the growing number of features led to uncontrolled software complexity and long development cycles. Since then, the problem has been recognized in many other domains—each with its own manifestations, challenges, and possible solutions.
In this talk, I will report on our experiences with the feature-interaction problem in different areas and applications. The primary goal is to raise awareness of that the feature-interaction problem is real and worthwhile to study. Furthermore, by means of recent experimental results, I will emphasize that there are different types of feature interactions and that these type are related. I will close the talk with a call to action to accept and approach the New Feature Interaction Challenge, which is to understand and exploit the different types of feature interactions to build better software (e.g., by developing better tools for feature-interaction testing).
Bio
Prof. Dr. Sven Apel holds the Chair of Software Engineering at the University of Passau, Germany. The chair is funded by the esteemed Emmy-Noether and Heisenberg Programs of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Prof. Apel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. His research interests include software product lines, software analysis, optimization, and evolution, as well as empirical methods and the human factor in software engineering. He is the author or co-author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. He serves regularly in program committees of top-ranked international conferences, he is member of the editorial boards of IEEE Software and Empirical Software Engineering, and he was program-committee co-chair of the 31st International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). His work has received awards by the Ernst-Denert Foundation and the Karin-Witte Foundation. Sven Apel is a member of the Young Academy of Europe.