A comprehensive product line scoping approach and its validation

• Published in: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 593 - 603
• Main Author: Schmid, Klaus
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.01.2002
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Software; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Context specific languages > Domain specific languages; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language features > Patterns; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Software configuration management and version control systems; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Distributed systems organizing principles > Client-server architectures; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Software architectures; Software engineering; Product structure; Software development; Product planning; Product development; Management planning; Software reusability; Large scale system
• ISBN: 158113472X; 9781581134728
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1145/581339.581415

Product Line Engineering is a recent approach to software development that specifically aims at exploiting commonalities and systematic variabilities among functionally overlapping systems in terms of large scale reuse. Taking full advantage of this potential requires adequate planning and management of the reuse approach as otherwise huge economic benefits will be missed due to an inappropriate alignment of the reuse infrastructure.Key in product line planning is the scoping activity, which aims at focussing the reuse investment where it pays. Scoping actually happens on several levels in the process: during the domain analysis step (analysis of product line requirements) a focusing needs to happen just like during the decision of what to implement for reuse. The latter decision has also important ramifications for the development of an appropriate reference architecture as it provides the reusability requirements for this step.In this paper, we describe an integrated approach that has been developed, improved, and validated over the last few years. The approach fully covers the scoping activities of domain scoping and reuse infrastructure scoping and was validated in several industrial case studies.