Combining declarative and procedural views in the feature-oriented specification and analysis of product families

We present the recently introduced feature-oriented language FLan as a proof of concept for specifying both declarative aspects of product families, namely constraints on their features, and procedural aspects, namely feature configuration and run-time behaviour. FLan is inspired by the concurrent constraint programming paradigm. A store of constraints allows one to specify in a declarative way all the constraints on features that are commonly used in software product line engineering, including the cross-tree constraints well known from feature models. A standard yet rich set of process-algebraic operators allows one to specify in a procedural way the configuration and behaviour of products. There is a close interaction between these two views: (i) the execution of a process is constrained by its store to forbid undesired configurations; (ii) a process can query a store to resolve design and behavioural choices; (iii) a process can update the store by adding new features.