Visual guidance for product line configuration using recommendations and non-functional properties

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are a mature approach for the derivation of a family of products using systematic reuse. Different combinations of predefined features enable tailoring the product to fit the needs of each customer. These needs are related to functional properties of the system (optional features) as well as non-functional properties (e.g., performance or cost of the final product). In industrial scenarios, the configuration process of a final product is complex and the tool support is usually limited to check functional properties interdependencies. In addition, the importance of nonfunctional properties as relevant drivers during configuration has been overlooked. Thus, there is a lack of holistic paradigms integrating recommendation systems and visualizations that can help the decision makers. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an interrelated set of visualizations for the configuration process filling these gaps. We integrate them as part of the FeatureIDE tool and we evaluate its effectiveness, scalability, and performance.