Collaborative and Coordinated Product Configuration Marcilio Mendonca 1 , Toacy Oliveira 2 , Donald Cowan 1 1 David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 2 Departamento de Computação, PUC-RS Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil {marcilio,dcowan}@csg.uwaterloo.ca, toacy@inf.pucrs.br † Technical Report CS-2006-15 – Version: May 16th, 2006. Abstract. Product configuration is a key activity of product engineering that regards the constrained combination and parameterization of product line assets as a means to achieve correct software specification. Current product configuration approaches frequently rely on the application engineer to translate user requirements into correct configuration choices. This process is error-prone and risky as requirements may lead to conflicting decisions at configuration time. Indeed, we deem that an important aspect of product configuration has long been neglected: its collaborative nature. In our research, we advocate that product configuration is enhanced by a collaborative perspective, providing that conflicting scenarios are properly handled. We propose an approach to support collaborative and coordinated product configuration by promoting processes to first-order elements for the explicit guidance of configuration decisions. We provide insights on important coordination issues and introduce an algorithm to derive process models from annotated feature models to illustrate the approach's feasibility. Keywords: Product Configuration, Software Processes, Software Product Lines, Collaborative Software Configuration. † A version of this paper has been submitted for publication. Copyright may be transferred without further notice and this version may no longer be accessible.