Abstract:This is a personal appreciation and snapshot view of Manfred Broy's contributions to the research area of feature-oriented system design and engineering. We sketch the algebraic approach to the area and relate Broy's work to it. To give it a concrete context, we compare it with our own work on feature orientation. There are a number of correspondences and some differences: Broy works at a higher level of abstraction, the specification level, we at a level closer to the software structure, the programming level. We put more emphasis on the concept of program similarity than Broy does.