Feature Interactions In Telecommunications And Software Systems V

Feature interaction is a phenomenon known to the designers of modern telephone switching systems. This phenomenon occurs when one feature modifies or subverts the operation of another one. This work brings together representatives of the telecommunications industry and the software industry.

Features - additional services - occur whenever organisations compete by differentiating their products from those of rival organisations. Adding one feature may break another, or interfere with it in an undesired way. This phenomenon is called feature interaction. This book explores ways in which the feature interaction problem may be mitigated.

Typically, telecommunications services are implemented in software. Feature interaction is the term used to describe interference between services or features; most attention is given to cases where the interference is undesirable, ie. there is an incompatibility. In telecommunications, control and data is distributed and on such a large scale that software development is by numerous disjoint teams; by its nature, therefore, this software experienced the feature interaction problem first. But, while the workshop focuses on communications services, the subject has relevance to any domain where separate software entities control a shared resource.

Deals with the feature interaction problem in telecommunication systems.

."..Tenth International Conference of Feature Interactions in Software and Communications Systems (ICFI 2009), held in Lisbon, Portugal, 11-12 June 2009"--Pref.

The International Conference on Feature Interactions in Software and Communication Systems (ICFI) has evolved out of the Feature Interaction Workshop (FIW), which started in 1992 as the leading forum for discussion and reporting on research on feature interactions in telecommunications systems. It is now concerned with feature interaction in all types of software systems. Participation includes practitioners, researchers and educators. The proceedings have been published by IOS Press since 1994.

In an information society, heavily dependent on communications and distributed systems, feature interactions are likely to become an even more important problem than they are today. A particularly interesting issue, given the current work on agents, is whether feature interactions will be more likely in systems with many autonomous agents performing tasks. The current demand for better and more convenient communications requires development of a variety of new services as quickly as possible. As the number of services becomes larger, however, feature interactions create incompatibilities between the various functions needed to implement them. In developing telecommunication systems, we now spend huge numbers of person-hours on software modifications and testing whenever a new function is added. Much of this time is spent on detecting and eliminating problems arising from feature interaction. In the future, as ever more services are offered, feature interactions will become a major bottleneck in the development of software for telecommunications systems. This book presents opinions on the technical problems involved in feature interactions and definitions of features and feature interactions.