The new feature interaction challenge
Sven Apel · 2017
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.