Software Architecture For Product Families

Software development organizations are now discovering the efficiencies that can be achieved by architecting entire software product families together. In Software Architecture for Product Families, experts from one of the world's most advanced software domain engineering projects share in-depth insights about the techniques that work -- and those that don't. The book offers a solutions-oriented, case-study approach covering the entire development lifecycle, based on advanced work done by three of Europe's leading technology companies and their academic partners. Discover the challenges that drive companies to consider architecting product families, and the new problems they encounter in doing so. Master concepts and terms that can be used to describe the architecture of a product family; then learn how to assess that architecture, and transform it into working applications. The authors also present chapter-length, real-world case studies of domain engineering projects at Nokia, Philips, and ABB.

This book contains the proceedings of a third workshop on the theme of Software Arc- tecture for Product Families. The first two workshops were organised by the ESPRIT project ARES, and were called “Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families”. Proceedings of the first workshop, held in November 1996, were only published electronically at: “http://www.dit.upm.es/~ares/”. Proceedings of the second workshop, held in February 1998, were published as Springer LNCS 1429. The ARES project was finished in February 1999. Several partners continued - operation in a larger consortium, ITEA project 99005, ESAPS. As such it is part of the European Eureka ! 2023 programme. The third workshop was organised as part of the ESAPS project. In order to make the theme of the workshop more generic we decided to rename it “International Workshop on Software Architectures for Product Families”. As with the earlier two workshops we managed to bring together people working in the so- ware architecture of product families and in software product-line engineering. Submitted papers were grouped in five sessions. Moreover, we introduced two s- sions, one on configuration management and one on evolution, because we felt that d- cussion was needed on these topics, but there were no submitted papers for these subjects. Finally, we introduced a surveys session, giving an overview of the present situation in Europe, focussed on ESAPS, and in the USA, focussed on the SEI Product Line Systems Program.

This book contains the proceedings of a third workshop on the theme of Software Arc- tecture for Product Families. The first two workshops were organised by the ESPRIT project ARES, and were called “Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families”. Proceedings of the first workshop, held in November 1996, were only published electronically at: “http://www.dit.upm.es/~ares/”. Proceedings of the second workshop, held in February 1998, were published as Springer LNCS 1429. The ARES project was finished in February 1999. Several partners continued - operation in a larger consortium, ITEA project 99005, ESAPS. As such it is part of the European Eureka ! 2023 programme. The third workshop was organised as part of the ESAPS project. In order to make the theme of the workshop more generic we decided to rename it “International Workshop on Software Architectures for Product Families”. As with the earlier two workshops we managed to bring together people working in the so- ware architecture of product families and in software product-line engineering. Submitted papers were grouped in five sessions. Moreover, we introduced two s- sions, one on configuration management and one on evolution, because we felt that d- cussion was needed on these topics, but there were no submitted papers for these subjects. Finally, we introduced a surveys session, giving an overview of the present situation in Europe, focussed on ESAPS, and in the USA, focussed on the SEI Product Line Systems Program.

This book originates from a workshop organised by ESPRIT project 20 477, ARES in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, February 1998. ARES is an acronym for Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems. Within this project we investigate techniques to deal with problems of software architecture of families of embedded systems. It is the second workshop organised by this project. Its predecessor was held in Las Navas de Marques, Spain, November 1996. The proceedings of the first workshop are only available in electronic format at "http://www.dit.upm.es/~ares/". The second workshop succeeded, even more than the first one, in gathering many of the most prominent people working in the area of software architecture for product families or product lines. This second workshop consisted of six sessions. The first session was meant to report the ARES results, according to the topics of the next five sessions. The remaining sessions dealt with different aspects of software architecture, focussed on applications for product families or product lines. Because there will be a separate book covering all ARES results, the first session is not included in this book. The workshop was chaired by Henk Obbink from Philips Research and Paul Clements from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They prepared and presented an overall conclusion at the end of the workshop. This conclusion was used in the introduction to this book.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Product-Family Engineering, PFE 2003, held in Siena, Italy in November 2003. The 36 revised full papers presented together with an introductory overview and 3 keynote presentations were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on variation mechanisms, requirements analysis and management, product derivation, transition to family development, industrial experience, evolution, and decision and derivation.

With SPLC 2005 we celebrated the formation of a new conference series, the International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) which results from the “uni?cation” of the former series of three SPLC (Software Product Line) Con- rences launched in 2000 in the USA, and the former series of ?ve PFE (Product Family Engineering) Workshops started in 1996 in Europe. SPLC is nowthe premier forum for the growing community of software p- duct line practitioners, researchers, and educators. SPLC o?ers a unique - portunity to present and discuss the most recent experiences, ideas, innovations, trends,andconcernsintheareaofsoftwareproductlineengineering andtobuild aninternationalnetworkofproductlinechampions.AninternationalSPLCSt- ring Committee has been established and it is the wish of this committee that from 2005 on, the SPLC conference will be held yearly in Europe, America, or Asia. The technical program of SPLC 2005 included. – two keynotes from David Weiss (Avaya, USA) and Jan Bosch (Nokia, F- land), both leading experts with academic and industrial insights; – 17 full and 3 short research papers organized around the following themes: feature modeling, re-engineering, strategies, validation, scoping and arc- tecture, and product derivation; – eight experience reports describing commercial application of product line practices; – two panels focused on special topics in product line practice and product line research; – tool demonstrations; – aHallofFamesessionthatcontinuedtheSPLCtraditioninaslightlyrevised format. In addition, the technical program was preceded by a tutorial and workshop day that included ten half-day tutorials presented by well-recognized experts and ?ve workshops on speci?c areas of product line research.

This book covers research into the most important practices in product line organization. Contributors offer experience-based knowledge on the domain and application engineering, the modeling and management of variability, and the design and use of tools to support the management of product line-related knowledge.