Using Feature Models for Creating Families of Documents

Variants in a family of office documents are usually created by ad-hoc copy and paste actions from a set of base documents. As a result, the set of variants is decoupled from the original documents and is difficult to manage. In this paper we present a novel approach that uses concepts from Feature Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) to specify document families to generate variants. As a proof of concept, we implemented the Document Feature Mapper tool, which is based on our previous experience in Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) with FODA. In our tool, variant spaces are precisely specified using feature models and mappings relating features to slices in the document family. Given a selection of features satisfying the feature model's constraints, a variant can be derived. To show the applicability of our approach and tool, we conducted two case studies with documents in the Open Document Format (ODF).