Softw Syst Model DOI 10.1007/s10270-011-0220-1 REGULAR PAPER Supporting multiple perspectives in feature-based configuration Arnaud Hubaux · Patrick Heymans · Pierre-Yves Schobbens · Dirk Deridder · Ebrahim Khalil Abbasi Received: 14 April 2011 / Revised: 23 August 2011 / Accepted: 5 October 2011 © Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract Feature diagrams have become commonplace in software product line engineering as a means to document variability early in the life cycle. Over the years, their appli- cation has also been extended to assist stakeholders in the configuration of software products. However, existing fea- ture-based configuration techniques offer little support for tailoring configuration views to the profiles of the various stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, yet for- mal and flexible, mechanism to leverage multidimensional separation of concerns in feature-based configuration. We propose a technique to specify concerns in feature diagrams and to generate automatically concern-specific configura- tion views. Three alternative visualisations are proposed. Our contributions are motivated and illustrated through excerpts from a real web-based meeting management application which was also used for a preliminary evaluation. We also Communicated by Robyn Lutz. A. Hubaux (B) · P. Heymans · P.-Y. Schobbens · E. K. Abbasi PReCISE Research Centre, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur, Namur, Belgium e-mail: ahu@info.fundp.ac.be P.-Y. Schobbens e-mail: pys@info.fundp.ac.be E. K. Abbasi e-mail: eab@info.fundp.ac.be P. Heymans INRIA Lille-Nord Europe, Université de Lille 1 - LIFL - CNRS, Lille, France e-mail: phe@info.fundp.ac.be D. Deridder Smals vzw, Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: dirk.deridder@gmail.com report on the progress made in the development of a tool supporting multi-view feature-based configuration. Keywords Software product line engineering · Feature diagram · Separation of concerns · Multi-view · Feature-based configuration 1 Introduction An increasing number of software developments adopt the paradigm of software product line engineering (SPLE) [1]. The goal of SPLE is to rationalise the development of fam- ilies of similar software products. A key idea is to institu- tionalise reuse throughout the development process to obtain economies of scale. SPLE is becoming increasingly widespread in industry, but is also a very active research area at the crossroads between many software development related disciplines. An important research topic in SPLE are feature diagrams (FDs) [2, 3]. FDs are a simple visual formalism whose main purpose is to document variability in terms of features, i.e. high-level descriptions of the capabilities of reusable arte- facts. The main concepts of the language are features (repre- sented as labelled nodes) and relationships between features (edges). The language is described and illustrated more accu- rately in Sect. 2. FDs have been given a formal semantics [3] which opened the way for safe and efficient automation of various, oth- erwise error-prone and tedious, tasks such as consistency checking, FD merging, product counting, etc. A repertoire of such automations can be found in [4]. The kind of automation that we focus on in this paper is feature-based configuration (FBC). FBC is an interactive process during which one or more stakeholders select and discard features for a specific 123