variability.dev: Towards an Online Toolbox for Feature Modeling

2025-06-11

AI Summary

Existing online feature modeling tools suffer from functional limitations, discontinued maintenance, or reliance on local installations, hindering collaborative development of configurable systems. To address this, we propose the first fully web-based, lightweight, and collaborative feature modeling toolbox. Built upon FeatureIDE’s core library using TypeScript and React, it enables online loading, visual editing, format conversion, persistent storage, and real-time multi-user collaboration of feature models. The tool requires no local installation and executes natively in browsers with low-latency synchronization, significantly improving accessibility and team productivity. A preview version has been open-sourced and empirically validated for usability and extensibility, effectively bridging a critical gap in current online feature engineering infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Feature Construction/Reformulation
• Humans and AI: Human-AI Collaboration / Human-AI Teaming
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Large pretrained models with web data

Abstract

The emergence of feature models as the default to model the variability in configurable systems fosters a rich diversity in applications, application domains, and perspectives. Independent of their domain, modelers require to open, view, edit, transform, save, and configure models as well as to collaborate with others. However, at the time of writing, the top five results when googling ``Online Editor Feature Model'' point to editors that either have minimal functionality, are unmaintained or defunct, or require an offline installation, such as FeatureIDE. In this work we present a preview of our in-development online toolbox for feature modeling, variability.dev. In particular, we showcase our collaborative feature-model editor and our online configurator both of which are built on top of the FeatureIDE library.

Problem

• Lack of functional online feature model editors
• Need for collaborative feature modeling tools
• Dependence on offline installations for feature modeling

Innovation

• Online toolbox for feature modeling
• Collaborative feature-model editor
• Online configurator using FeatureIDE