featureide

FeatureIDE is an open-source framework and integrated development environment for feature-oriented software development and software product line engineering. It is implemented as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE, providing tooling to model software variability, reason about constraints among features, and derive concrete product configurations from a feature model.

The core components include a graphical feature modeling editor that supports feature diagrams and a constraint language for specifying dependencies, a product-derivation engine that validates configurations against model constraints, and a set of generators and templates that translate a selected feature configuration into executable artifacts or project skeletons. FeatureIDE emphasizes extensibility and pluggability, allowing new feature models, constraint languages, and code generators to be added as plug-ins to broaden language and domain coverage. It supports multiple languages and platforms through language-specific generators, enabling targeted code generation, documentation, or build configuration.

In practice, teams model features and their relationships, configure a product by selecting features, and automatically derive the corresponding software artifacts. This supports variability management, reuse, and systematic product line development across domains such as embedded systems and software product line research. The project is open source and maintained by an active community, with documentation and repositories available to support education, research, and industrial use of feature-oriented development methods.