Frank van der Linden

A parallel object-oriented language with inheritance and subtyping

This paper shows that inheritance and subtyping can be introduced advantageously into a parallel object-oriented language, POOL-I. These concepts are clearly distinguished, because they deal with different aspects of programming. In this way several problems traditionally adhering to inheritance can be solved. The language POOL-I is a parallel object-oriented language with a strong typing scheme which includes genericity and dynamic binding. A novel and particularly powerful mechanism offers the possibility to manipulate and analyse types dynamically.

CoPAM: a compact-oriented platform architecting method family for product family engineering

In this paper we describe a family of methods that enable the development of product family architectures. These methods have in common that they offer support in developing a family of software-intensive products on the basis of one or more common platforms, that they use component technology to build the platforms and the products, and that they use several well-defined software development processes. The methods differ in many important decisions regarding processes and architecture, which are tuned carefully to the business and organizational context. In this way the method family establishes a significant synergy in the development of several product families in a large and diverse industrial company.

Adopting and Institutionalizing a Product Line Culture

The strengths of product line engineering have been described before. But how can an organization make the move from developing one-of products to product line engineering without major interruptions in the day-today work? This paper describes how to perform the transition to product line engineering and lists the various strategies for such a transition. It also describes how to create an adoption plan and how to institutionalize product line engineering in an organization.

Engineering Software Architectures, Processes and Platforms for System Families - ESAPS Overview

Between July 1999 and June 2001, 22 European companies and research institutes worked together in the ESAPS project to enhance their capabilities for engineering software for system families. This paper describes the main objectives of the project, and an overview of the results obtained in the project. Finally, the project is related to other projects and initiatives with similar goals.

Quantifying Product Line Benefits

Software product lines promise benefits like development and maintenance effort reduction, time to market decrease, and quality improvement, all resulting from planned and systematic reuse of common core assets. However, very little quantitative data has been measured so far to prove these promises. This paper formulates and discusses 7 hypotheses on how the promised advantages would look like in a quantitative way. It is meant to be a starting point for discussion on how to quantify which product line benefits and how they can be measured.

Platform Engineering for the Medical Domain

The various products of Philips Medical Systems are grouped in product families. This paper describes the development of a single platform for several of these families. This platform incorporates shared functionality and shared architecture. Important entities within the platform are components, interfaces and information models.

An Integral Hierarchy and Diversity Model for Describing Product Family Architecture

Formal and informal methods for describing software architectures traditionally focus on a systems components and the interfaces between these components. They assume a design process in which the architect basically defines the architecture of a single product. If variants of this product are required, they are either handled implicitly or are defined at a later stage. Since industrial development processes which result in families of products are becoming increasingly common, there is a need for architectural models and notations in which diversity is modelled as an explicit and integral part of the architecture definition process. We believe that the use of such models can promote the overall optimisation of product families and can facilitate validation of architectural decisions. This paper presents a model which can be used to describe and manage architectures in a number of product family-oriented design processes.

Open Source Practices in Software Product Line Engineering

This chapter presents a short introduction to software product line engineering. It describes experiences of introducing software product line engineering in industry followed by a discussion on some problems in product line engineering originating from the distributed organisation that is involved in many cases. It addresses how solutions originating from open source software development may be used to solve the mentioned problems, and it describes some cases where open source practices have shown to be very useful.

Open Source Software as Open Innovation : Experiences from the Medical Domain

In the past decade, we have witnessed an increased interest amongst commercial and public sector organisations for Open Source Software (OSS). As any individual and organisation has the right to freely read, use, improve and redistribute the source code for software that is developed and released under an OSS licence, it creates new opportunities for Open Innovation. In this chapter, we report on how companies collaborate on production of software artefacts in an OSS project, thereby showing how a form of Open Innovation can be utilised by a large company that goes beyond collaborative development of ideas. In doing so, we report on company decisions and development practices concerning how a software project evolved from proprietary to an open collaborative software development project that is released under an OSS licence (LGPLv2).

ESAPS - Engineering Software Architectures, Processes and Platforms for System Families

Across Europe 21 companies and research institutions work since July 1999 together on the Development and Evolution of Software Architectures, Processes and Platforms for System Families in the ITEA project ESAPS. Based upon earlier and smaller scale experiments in ARES and PRAISE ESAPS aims to improve the state of practice in European industry with respect to the Engineering of Architectures, Processes and platforms for system families in order to achieve significant higher levels of reuse and improved system quality.