| This thesis describes a method of dealing with: The Feature Interaction Problem. Dr. Pamela Zave, a Fellow of the ACM and a Technology Advisor for the AT&T Software Systems Research Laboratory, first described the 'feature interaction problem' in her paper Feature Interactions and Formal Specifications in Telecommunications (Zave, 1993). When features are added to a base system, both expected and unexpected interactions may occur in the base system as well as in the feature. The unexpected interactions are the problem.;The feature interaction problem also occurs in software development. A methodology combining several software engineering techniques, resulting in a structure that can detect and analyze areas of interaction between system components is presented.;Use cases are modeled as a type of directed graph called an Event Driven Petri Net (EDPN). The EDPNs are then represented in a relational schema. This type of modeling allows feature interaction detection though SQL queries on the EDPN data. |
