Abstract
In the context of software product line engineering, collaborative configuration is a decision-making process where multiple stakeholders contribute in building a single product specification. Several approaches addressing collaboration during configuration have already been proposed, but we still have little hard evidence about their effectiveness and little understanding about how collaborative configuration process should be carried out. This paper presents a classification framework to help understand existing collaborative configuration approaches. To elaborate it, a systematic mapping study was conducted guided by three research questions and 41 primary studies was selected out of 238 identified ones. The proposed framework is composed of four dimensions capturing main aspects related to configuration approaches: purpose, collaboration, process and tool. Each dimension is itself multi-faceted and a set of attributes is associated to each facet. Using this framework, we position and classify existing approaches, structure the representation of each approach characteristics, highlight their strengths and weaknesses, compare them to each other, and identify open issues. This study gives a solid foundation for classifying existing and future approaches for product lines collaborative configuration. Researchers and practitioners can use our framework for identifying existing research/technical gaps to attack, better scoping their own contributions, or understanding existing ones. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.