Frank J. van der Linden - Böcker

Since 1995, a series of projects on the topic of software product family engineering were done, ARES, Praise, ESAPS, CAF+, and FAMILIES. These projects originated from industry needs to improve software engineering performance by organizing the development in families. The results have been implemented in several large industries and involve a radical shift in software construction, and production.

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. While the underlying concepts are straightforward enough – building a family of related products or systems by planned and careful reuse of a base of generalized software development assets – the devil can be in the details, as successful product line practice can involve organizational change, business process change, and technology change.The authors ideally combine academic research results with industrial real-world experiences, thus presenting a broad view on product line engineering so that both managers and technical specialists will benefit from reading it. After presenting a common framework for the description of the industrial case studies, 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. After reading this book, you will understand all the relevant aspects, regarding business, architecture, process, and organizational issues, of applying software product line engineering. If you consider using a product line approach in your organization, or if you want to improve your current practices you will find a rich set of useful information at your fingertips – from practitioners to practitioners.

I. Software Product Line Engineering Are you interested in producing software products or software-intensive systems at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality? If so, you are holding the right book in your hands. Software product line engineering has proven to be the methodology for Higher quality, lower developing a diversity of software products and software-intensive systems cost, and shorter at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality. Numerous reports development times document the significant achievements and experience gained by introducing software product lines in the software industry. Chapter 21 of this book summarises several cases. Concerning the terminology, there is an almost synonymous use of the terms Software product line “software product family” and “software product line”. Whereas in Europe vs. software product the term software product family is used more often, in North America the family term software product line is used more frequently. This is, among other things, reflected in the names of the two former conference series (the so- ware product line conference series, started in 2000 in the USA, and the product family engineering (PFE) workshop series, started in 1996 in Europe) which were merged in 2004 to form the leading software product line conference (SPLC) series. In this book, we use the term software product line.