Kevin Feichtinger

Kevin Feichtinger

Postdoctoral Researcher @ Dependability of Software-intensive Systems Group

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Dependability of Software-intensive Systems Group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. I completed my Ph.D. studies in computer science major software engineering at the LIT Cyber-Physical Systems Lab at Johannes Kepler University Linz in 2023. My current research interests include software product lines, variability modeling, model transformations, software evolution, software consistency, and software development for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS).

Current Research

Transforming Variability Artifacts

Many different variability modeling approaches have been developed in the last 30 years. All of them have strengths and weaknesses and many have been shown to be at least useful for certain domains or use cases. However, it is difficult to understand the capabilities and differences of approaches to select the right approach for a specific use case. Thus, frequently new modeling approaches and custom artifacts for managing variability, e.g., domain-specific languages or spreadsheets, are developed. Therefore we developed TRAVART (TRAnsforming Variability ARTifacts), a transformation approach for variability artifacts (variability models as well as custom artifacts). We successfully transformed various existing variability artifacts from academia as well as industry, investigated the transformation impact on variability artifacts, and inspected the information lost during round-trip transformations. We showed that TRAVART supports and automates the transformation of different variability artifacts created using heterogeneous approaches. One can switch between variability artifacts of different types without losing already invested modeling efforts and compare the strengths and weaknesses of different variability modeling approaches. The work is summarized in the PhD Thesis.

Core publications:

  • Kevin Feichtinger and Rick Rabiser. 2020. Towards Transforming Variability Models: Usage Scenarios, Required Capabilities and Challenges. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B (SPLC ‘20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 44–51. https://doi.org/10.1145/3382026.3425768
  • Kevin Feichtinger, Kristof Meixner, Rick Rabiser, and Stefan Biffl. 2020. Variability Transformation from Industrial Engineering Artifacts: An Example in the Cyber-Physical Production Systems Domain. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B (SPLC ‘20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 65–73. https://doi.org/10.1145/3382026.3425770
  • Kevin Feichtinger, Johann Stöbich, Dario Romano, and Rick Rabiser. 2021. TRAVART: An Approach for Transforming Variability Models. In Proceedings of the 15th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VaMoS ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 8, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442391.3442400
  • Kevin Feichtinger. 2021. A flexible approach for transforming variability models. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B (SPLC ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461002.3473069
  • Kevin Feichtinger, Chico Sundermann, Thomas Thüm, and Rick Rabiser. 2022. It’s your loss: classifying information loss during variability model roundtrip transformations. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A (SPLC ‘22), Vol. A. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 67–78. https://doi.org/10.1145/3546932.3546990

Community-Driven Language for Variability Models

The Universal Variability Language is a community effort towards a unified language for variability models. Universal Variability Language is a direct result of the efforts within the MODEVAR initiative.

Core publications:

  • Chico Sundermann, Kevin Feichtinger, Dominik Engelhardt, Rick Rabiser, and Thomas Thüm. 2021. Yet another textual variability language? a community effort towards a unified language. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A (SPLC ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 136–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461001.3471145
  • Dario Romano, Kevin Feichtinger, Danilo Beuche, Uwe Ryssel, and Rick Rabiser. 2022. Bridging the gap between academia and industry: transforming the universal variability language to pure::variants and back. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B (SPLC ‘22), Vol. B. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 123–131. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503229.3547056
  • Chico Sundermann, Stefan Vill, Thomas Thüm, Kevin Feichtinger, Prankur Agarwal, Rick Rabiser, José A. Galindo, and David Benavides. 2023. UVLParser: Extending UVL with Language Levels and Conversion Strategies. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B (SPLC ‘23), Vol. B. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 39–42. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579028.3609013