Foundations for Feature Engineering of Software Systems

Abstract

The gulf between the user's and the developer's perspectives leads to difficulties in producing successful software systems. Users are focused on the problem domain, where the system's features are the primary concern, and developers are focused on the solution domain, where the system's life cycle artifacts are key. Presently, there is little understanding of how to narrow this gulf. This paper presents an organizing viewpoint that the authors term "feature engineering." Feature engineering promotes features as first-class objects throughout the software life cycle and across the problem and solution domains. They present a model of life cycle artifacts and show how features can be incorporated into that model. They then discuss the application of feature engineering to a variety of life cycle activities, examining in depth its effect on architectural design.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1996
Accession Number
ADA446146

Entities

People

  • Alexander L. Wolf
  • C. R. Turner

Organizations

  • University of Colorado Boulder

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Application Software
  • Artifacts
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Contracts
  • Cycles
  • Engineering
  • Information Operations
  • Instructions
  • Life Cycles
  • Operating Systems
  • Specifications
  • Switching
  • Test Sets

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Software Engineering.