Conjoint Analysis of Software Product Lines: A Feature Based Approach

Today many software systems are developed for a wide even anonymous audience. If needs of customers are too diverse, offering one software product can be too inflexible. In that situation offering a Software Product Line (SPL) can be economically advantageous. However, product management of SPLs has to decide what features to realize. This decision requires information on the utility features spend to customers and customer´s willingness to pay (WTP). Conjoint Analysis (CA) is a promising way to measure both. However, the design and implementation of a conjoint study is costly even though much of the work to design a conjoint study has already been done in Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). To utilize the work of SPLE for the design of conjoint surveys, we propose a procedure to automatically derive conjoint surveys from Feature Models and report on our implementation of a conjoint survey generator and a web-based surveying tool.