Software Product Lines

Software product lines represent perhaps the most exciting paradigm shift in software development since the advent of high-level programming languages. Nowhere else in software engineering have we seen such breathtaking improvements in cost, quality, time to market, and developer productivity, often registering in the order-of-magnitude range. Here, the authors combine academic research results with real-world industrial experiences, thus presenting a broad view on product line engineering so that both managers and technical specialists will benefit from exposure to this work. They capture the wealth of knowledge that eight companies have gathered during the introduction of the software product line engineering approach in their daily practice.

Software product line engineering has proven to be the methodology for developing a diversity of software products and software intensive systems at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality. In this book, Pohl and his co-authors present a framework for software product line engineering which they have developed based on their academic as well as industrial experience gained in projects over the last eight years. They do not only detail the technical aspect of the development, but also an integrated view of the business, organisation and process aspects are given. In addition, they explicitly point out the key differences of software product line engineering compared to traditional single software system development, as the need for two distinct development processes for domain and application engineering respectively, or the need to define and manage variability.

While standardization has empowered the software industry to substantially scale software development and to provide affordable software to a broad market, it often does not address smaller market segments, nor the needs and wishes of individual customers. Software product lines reconcile mass production and standardization with mass customization in software engineering. Ideally, based on a set of reusable parts, a software manufacturer can generate a software product based on the requirements of its customer. The concept of features is central to achieving this level of automation, because features bridge the gap between the requirements the customer has and the functionality a product provides. Thus features are a central concept in all phases of product-line development. The authors take a developer’s viewpoint, focus on the development, maintenance, and implementation of product-line variability, and especially concentrate on automated product derivation based on a user’s feature selection. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides a general introduction to feature-oriented software product lines, describing the product-line approach and introducing the product-line development process with its two elements of domain and application engineering. The pivotal part II covers a wide variety of implementation techniques including design patterns, frameworks, components, feature-oriented programming, and aspect-oriented programming, as well as tool-based approaches including preprocessors, build systems, version-control systems, and virtual separation of concerns. Finally, part III is devoted to advanced topics related to feature-oriented product lines like refactoring, feature interaction, and analysis tools specific to product lines. In addition, an appendix lists various helpful tools for software product-line development, along with a description of how they relate to the topics covered in this book. To tie the book together, the authors use two running examples that are well documented in the product-line literature: data management for embedded systems, and variations of graph data structures. They start every chapter by explicitly stating the respective learning goals and finish it with a set of exercises; additional teaching material is also available online. All these features make the book ideally suited for teaching – both for academic classes and for professionals interested in self-study.

Software product lines are emerging as a critical new paradigm for software development. Product lines are enabling organizations to achieve impressive time-to-market gains and cost reductions. With the increasing number of product lines and product-line researchers and practitioners, the time is right for a comprehensive examination of the issues surrounding the software product line approach. The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is proud to sponsor the first conference on this important subject. This book comprises the proceedings of the First Software Product Line Conference (SPLC1), held August 28-31, 2000, in Denver, Colorado, USA. The twenty-seven papers of the conference technical program present research results and experience reports that cover all aspects of software product lines. Topics include business issues, enabling technologies, organizational issues, and life-cycle issues. Emphasis is placed on experiences in the development and fielding of product lines of complex systems, especially those that expose problems in the design, development, or evolution of software product lines. The book will be essential reading for researchers and practitioners alike.

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.

Over the last decade, software product line engineering (SPLE) has emerged as one of the most promising software development paradigms for increasing productivity in IT-related industries. Detailing the various aspects of SPLE implementation in different domains, Applied Software Product Line Engineering documents best practices with regard to system development. Expert contributors from academia and industry come together and focus on core asset development, product development, and management, addressing the process, technical, and organizational issues needed to meet the growing demand for information. They detail the adoption and diffusion of SPLE as a primary software development paradigm and also address technical and managerial issues in software product line engineering. Providing an authoritative perspective of the latest research and practice in SLPE, the text: Presents in-depth discussions and many industry / case studies Covers applications in various domains including automotive, business process management, and defense Organized according to the organizational, process, and technical aspects of software product lines within an organization Provides the expertise of a distinguished panel of global contributors Ever-increasing global competition coupled with a fragile world economy means that the pressure is on for software engineers and software process improvement professionals to find ways to meet the needs of expanding markets—with greater efficiency and effectiveness. This book arms readers with the insight needed to harness the power of SPLE to increase productivity, reduce time to market, and to handle the growing diversity in the quickly evolving global marketplace.

illustrates a process that has been successfully applied to reduce costs for organizations that develop large programming systems. With the help of this book, many more can learn how to exploit the idea of program families and bring about a substantial improvement in the state of practice in the software industry. --David Lorge Parnas Many organizations have mastered the practice of software development, yet few have become truly efficient at software production. With the adoption of an efficient, systematic software production method, organizations can gain significant competitive advantages, including reduced time to market, better schedule predictability, more reliable code, and decreased costs. Software Product-Line Engineering provides the actionable information and proven tactics necessary to effect organizational change and make your future software projects more successful. The authors outline a systematic method for rapid software production through the FAST (Family-Oriented Abstraction, Specification, and Translation) process, a revolutionary commercial product developed at AT&T that continues to evolve at Lucent Technologies. FAST uses practical domain engineering to dec