Welcome to the Tenth International Conference on Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems (ICFI2009), which is held in Lisbon, Portugal, 11–12 June 2009. The first event of this kind was a workshop held in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1992. This was a true workshop, with invited talks, short papers, and focused discussions; no formal proceedings were published. The concept rapidly matured into a series of international workshops and conferences held in North America, Europe, and Japan.

Features are additional services or optional add-ons to a basic system. They began to be studied in the 1990s when they arose in the telecommunications domain: at that time, major telephony providers were adding services like “call forwarding” and “ring back when free” to their basic telephone service. Features occur whenever organizations compete by differentiating their products from those of rival organizations. They also occur when products are upgraded. New software releases are typically described in terms of the features added (and the bugs fixed!) since the last release. Unfortunately, adding one feature may break another, or interfere with it in an undesired way. This phenomenon is called feature interaction. “Feature interference” would have been a better term, since interactions can be good as well as bad, but the term “feature interaction” has stuck – in the global community.

This series of workshops is devoted to exploring ways in which the feature interaction problem may be mitigated. This may be done in several ways:

• by developing new methods for designing and producing software, which support the introduction of features in a safe and understood way;

• by developing tools and techniques for detecting feature interactions once features have been introduced, but before the software is released (this is called off-line detection);

• by developing methods for managing feature interactions when they occur in live systems (this is called on-line detection and resolution).

The conference aims to bring together representatives of the telecommunications industry, the software industry, and the research community working on all aspects of feature interactions in order to discuss possible solutions and their practical applications, as well as setting directions for further research.

The Programme for the conference includes two invited papers from speakers who were chosen because of their excellent contributions to fields which are related to but outside of feature interaction. Additionally, there are 14 full papers and 7 short papers. Each paper received at least three reviews from members of the Programme Committee. All submitted papers where well in the scope of the conference. Even for papers with weaker evaluation, the Programme Committee positively accepted them as work-in-progress papers. This allows people new to the field in emerging areas to become members of the community. Also it allows the community to continue to have this event and see it as a productive discussion forum for the future.

ICFI2009 is held in conjunction with the Distributed Computing Techniques 2009 (DisCoTec'09), a major cluster of conferences sponsored by IFIP. The collocation with a large conference is the first experience in the ICFI history. We are happy to have such a great opportunity to realize cultural exchange with people in other communities.

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to all the authors who have submitted to ICFI, the invited speakers and the panelists for taking part. We thank the Programme Committee for producing thorough reviews to short timescales. Thanks are also due to Prof. António Ravara, Technical University of Lisbon, and Prof. Elie Najm, ENST, for their invaluable support for the collocation with DisCoTec'09.

Masahide Nakamura & Stephan Reiff-Marganiec

April 2009