Feature interaction problems in middleware services

Nowadays, middleware, such as CORBA, J2EE and NET, has become a critical infrastructure for numerous networked applications. As the services are usually developed and deployed in a parallel, independent and incremental manner, some undesirable interactions are likely to take place. These interactions may have negative impacts on the whole middleware based systems. We argue that such problem is quite similar to the feature interaction problem (FIP) in telecom. This paper makes three contributions to study FIP in software systems beyond the telecommunication domain. With a conceptual comparison analysis and two real cases, it reveals that FIP exists in middleware. Secondly, we detect the ultimate causes of interactions at requirement level, which demonstrates the experiences of studying FIP in telecom are helpful. Finally, it shows that the study of FIP in middleware has some distinctions comparing with that in telecom, for example, the results of FIP detection can be reused in different middleware products.