Software Product Line Engineering and Evolution

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is of interest to any company that develops a line of software products or services that are similar, but also customized for specific customers or market segments. Developing and maintaining efficiently such software families requires specific tools and concepts, since the ones of classical software engineering are designed with a single product in mind. For instance, an error detected in one product should be analyzed to discover all products affected, and correct the problem for all products at once.

The introduction of SPLE can bring important benefits to software developers: for instance, Hewlett-Packard reported a four-fold increase of development productivity, and a ten-fold decrease of the number of defects. Cummins, Inc., reported a 50-fold reduction of time-to-market. Furthermore, introducing a product line brings commercial advantages and thus higher margins, by targeting customer needs very precisely while offering a large portfolio of products at a reduced cost.

The main tool we propose for managing a product line is Feature Modeling, a technique to explicitly and compactly document features and their legal combinations. Feature models are the basis for efficient variability management, quality assurance and automated product derivation.

Keywords

software product lines – software reuse – evolution

Current Projects

• Text-based Variability Language (TVL)
• Featured Transition Systems (FTS)
• Feature Configuration Workflows (FCW)
• The spin-off project CONF&TI

Selected publications