Software Variation by Means of First-Class Change Objects

A growing trend in software construction advocates the encapsulation of software building blocks as features which better match the language of requirements. As a result, programmers find it easier to design and compose different variations of their systems. Feature Oriented Programming (FOP) is the study domain that targets this trend. The authors argue that the state-of-the-art techniques for FOP have shortcomings because they specify a feature as a set of building blocks rather than a transition that has to be applied on a software system in order to add that feature's functionality to the system.