Feature Diagrams for Change-Oriented Programming

Abstract. The idea of feature-oriented programming is to map requirements to fea-tures, concepts that can be composed to form a software product. Change-orientedprogramming (ChOP), in which features are seen as sets of changes that can beapplied to a base program, has recently been proposed as an approach to FOP.Changes are recorded as the programmer works and can encapsulate any developeraction, including the removing of code.Before changes can be combined to form a product, it has to be verified that thereare no harmful interactions between selected changes. There exists, however, noformal model of the current approach that may serve as a reference specificationfor ChOP implementations. In an effort to fill this gap, we propose a formal modelof ChOP, which, as we will show, maps to the well-understood notion of feature di-agram. Thanks to this, we can reuse a number of results in feature diagram researchand apply them to ChOP.Keywords. Formal Methods, Feature-Oriented Programming, Feature Diagrams,Software Product Lines