Do We Need Another Textual Language for Feature Modeling? A Preliminary Evaluation on the XML Based Approach
Jingang Zhou, Dazhe Zhao, Xu Li, Jiren Liu · 2012
Feature Modeling (FM) is an essential activity for capturing com- monality and variability in software product lines. Most of today's FM tools are graphical and represent feature models as feature diagrams (FDs). Though FDs are intuitive at first sight, they generally lack of expressiveness and vague in syntax. To overcome these problems, some textual languages are proposed with a richer expressiveness and formal semantics. But are these languages superior than existing modeling approach as they stated, e.g., XML-based one, which is standard based and has vast of acceptance of application other than FM. In this paper, we elaborate the XML-based textual feature modeling approach, evaluate it from multi perspectives, and compare it with another representative textual FM language —TVL, a recently published language. We demonstrate the advan- tages and disadvantages of the XML-based approach, and argue that the XML- based approach is still the most available and pragmatic approach for adoption in industry though it has some clear limitations which can be fed to more advanced tool support.