Features are modifications to the control of telecommunications services. A feature interaction occurs when the behaviour of another, which can lead to unexpected or undesired behaviour, which affects the quality of service. The goal of this volume is to generate a combination of techniques through protocol engineering, software testing, formal techniques and AI and applications to telecommunications services.

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.

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.

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

Deals with the feature interaction problem in telecommunication systems.