Gary J. Chastek

Exploring the Context of Product Line Adoption

To successfully adopt a product line approach an organization needs to define its adoption goals, conceive a strategy, and implement a plan to achieve those goals. This process is repeated for each business unit and individual affected by the product line adoption. This paper describes how the characteristics of the market, organization, business unit, and individual influence product line adoption goals, strategies, and plans.

A Production System for Software Product Lines

Companies such as Toyota have achieved significant competitive advantage by treating product production as a system that can be planned and optimized. Software product line organizations can achieve similar advantage when they explicitly coordinate the actions of core asset and product developers. We describe a technique for planning the production system for a software product line organization. The technique encompasses a production strategy, which relates the production goals of the product line to the method of core asset and product development; and a production method, which coordinates the development of core assets with the production of products. The results of the technique are documented in a production plan, which guides the product developers through the steps of production. Data gathered from representatives of SPLC Product Line Hall of Fame members and our experience working with product line organizations are used to illustrate problems and specify solutions.

Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

AbstractMany attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.

An early look at defining variability requirements for system of systems platforms

In the commercial domain, platform-based approaches, in which a set of functions or services are bundled to form the basis of many products, have enabled efficient development of systems and their composition into systems of systems. A successful platform must balance sufficient commonality to support economical reuse, while also providing variability and extensibility to enable innovation in system and system of systems (SoS) capabilities. These commonality/variability tradeoffs for SoS platforms are frequently tacit decisions, since there are no accepted techniques for analyzing such decisions at the scale and degree of requirements uncertainty that characterize most SoSs. The objective of our work is to develop a method for analyzing decisions about requirements for common platforms for SoSs. The method begins with the requirements tasks of identifying and selecting appropriate variabilities (variation points, variation ranges, and variation decision binding times) to support immediate SoS needs, and also enable innovation and controlled evolution. We are currently conducting a workshop and interviews with SoS experts to define the essential technical problems in SoS common platform development and identify solution constraints. We will then define a simplified SoS with limited capability requirements to use as a model problem. We will use the model problem to assess the fit of existing scope, commonality, and variability methods from software product lines to the SoS context, and extend existing economic models using real options and probabilistic models to model uncertainty in evolution requirements. While it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of our approach, it is based on proven technologies from the mature field of software product lines and so we have confidence that we can build successful SoS techniques from this foundation.

Production planning in a software product line organization

Summary form only given. Most software product line organizations recognize the need for two roles: core asset developers and product builders. These roles may both be assumed by an individual or each may be assumed by persons who are in different administrative units, in different geographic locations, or of vastly different skill levels. Production planning is used in many industries to coordinate the efforts of external suppliers who supply parts and to structure the assembly line where products are produced. The need for coordination in a software product line organization is even greater than in hard goods manufacturing because product production is less constrained by physical properties or industrial standards. Our research has shown that organizations that fail to plan production are more likely to fail than those that do plan. The goal of this tutorial is to provide participants with techniques for conducting production planning.

Commonality and variability analysis for resource constrained organizations

This position paper describes our current work in adapting a software product line technique to the constraints of a development organization. We report on applying a commonality and variability analysis with an organization adopting a software product line approach while facing sever resource constraints because of current product development commitments. The immediate focus of the paper is on blending commonality and variability analysis into the organizations existing requirements development process. The longer-term goal of this work is to facilitate the transition to product lines in a minimally intrusive way. The paper describes how the approach was introduced and implemented, and summarizes the benefits achieved and the issues arising from the work to date.

First international workshop on requirements engineering practices on software product line engineering (REPOS 2012)

The objective of this workshop is to attract professionals from academia and industry to discuss the role of requirements engineering in product line developments, including new techniques, methods and tools that will help practitioners to improve their current requirements engineering practices. The workshop will address experiences from practitioners, empirical evidence about current practices, successful deployment of novel approaches, and current obstacles and proposed solutions. Nevertheless, REPOS also aims to become a discussion forum about the state of the art and practice for practitioners and researchers on Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines.

Developing a Measurement Program for Software Product Lines

Product line management should use measurement to anticipate the future rather than to simply record the past. The benefit and value of software measurement for product lines comes from the decisions and actions taken to support the product line in response to analysis of the data, not from the collection of the data. Addressing this management need is the primary goal of this tutorial.

Product Line Analysis

Product line analysis (PLA) is early requirements engineering for a product line of software-intensive systems. It encompasses the rapid elicitation, analysis, specification, and verification of the requirements for a product line. The premise of product line analysis is that a sound initial understanding of the problem to be solved is essential before an organization embarks on a software product line as a solution.

Software Product Lines

Any organization that develops software creates multiple software applications that have some characteristics in common. Some software has the same application architecture, some run on the same execution platforms, and others support the same segment of the business. Whatever the commonalities are amongst the software applications, it is important that these commonalities be managed properly so that the organization can realize the highest economy of scale. The software product line practice was designed to manage software products, and their commonalities were designed to maximize the benefits to the organization.