Feature trees are a well-established instrument for domain analysis and modeling [2,3]. But for extremely complex product families like a vehicle manufacturer?s product range, they become very large, and thus cumbersome and inflexible. This is particularly true when changes to the tree?s structure have to be managed and documented over a long period of time. Furthermore, a conflict of aims arises when using feature trees in large organizations: while a single global feature tree for the entire company is desirable, local amendments are indispensable because often some applications of the feature models require amendments not visible in other application contexts.

Especially in such intricate organizational contexts, feature modeling has great potential: features may serve as a link between management, marketing and development to ease communication between them and they can provide a central view on variability in a wide range of development artifacts - such as requirements, design models or test cases - thus becoming the core of all variability and evolution management, cf. [1]. But to take full advantage of this potential, it is essential to make feature trees more manageable.