  The customers and users need for new products and services according to
high-quality standards have increased in the last time. In that sense, the
production processes must be aligned with the organization and development
process in order to achieve this goal. The aim of this paper is to synthesize
the current state of the research reported in the literature regarding the
application domain, underlying model, origin, degree of empirical validation
and quality of existing feature modeling tools used in SPL. Therefore, this
technical report presents the protocol definition for a systematic mapping
study (SMS) that we will conduct to identify and assess the set of relevant
papers on feature model tools.
