Günter Böckle

A Cost Model for Software Product Lines

In this paper we present a first-order cost model that describes the costs associated with developing products in a product line organization. The model addresses a number of issues that we present as a set of scenarios. The goal of this work is to develop models of varying granularity that support a managers decision-making needs at a variety of levels. The basis of these models is the relationships among the artifacts of the product line.

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.

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.

Innovation management for product line engineering organizations

Active innovation management is performed by companies to create an environment that fosters innovation. In a product line environment, platform and predefined variability restrict innovation because the development artifacts in the platform and the variation are prescribed. An analysis of innovation projects in literature shows that moderate innovations like introducing a new member of a product line yield only a small return on investment. This paper introduces a series of measures that can help to prevent a lock-in of a product line organization with respect to innovation. We take a look at various aspects of innovation – personnel, customer and market, technology and engineering, organization and process. Organizations may pick the best-suited measures for their current situation.

Model-based requirements engineering for product lines

Requirements engineering is an important part of software and systems engineering but needs some specific support to apply it to product line engineering. Tracing requirements for different products of the product line to different architecture instantiations and component variants, and to the corresponding design decisions, by using a requirements model can reduce development time significantly. Requirements engineering is used in both the domain engineering and application engineering processes of product line engineering. A good requirements model can support major parts of both, such as commonality analysis and tracing of connections between requirements, architecture, components, and tests. This paper presents our approach for a such a model, and show how groups can work in parallel on products of the product family.

A Framework for Software Product Line Engineering

In this chapter you will learn: o The principles of software product line engineering subsumed by our software product line engineering framework. o The difference between domain engineering and application engineering, which are the two key processes of software product line engineering. o Where variability of the product line is defined and where it is exploited. o The structure of this book, which is derived from the framework.

Session Report for Session 2: Process Issues

The process session at PFE-4 covered a large variety of process issues that have to be taken into account during product family engineering. The covered topics ranged from knowledge elicitation techniques that enable the usage of legacy documentation during domain modeling to processes for developing product family architectures that integrate their creation and evaluation.

Product Validation: Discussion Report

A key issue in the development of a product line is obviously to ensure that the developed products exhibit the desired characteristics, both on a functional as well as on a quality level. This was in the focus of the papers in this session. Although only two papers were presented in this session (the papers by Stefan Ferber et al. and by Josef Weingartner), this gave rise to an interesting and lively discussion.

Discussion Report ``Business'' Session

The “Business” session of the workshop covers the basic question to be answered when a product line approach is adapted by an organisation:

Systematic Assessment of Computer Systems Architectures

Development, selection, and evolution of workstation architectures depend mainly on a comprehensive assessment of the architecture and its parts. Proper assessment of an architecture is a key to its success on the market. This paper presents a systematic method for system assessment which supports the user to make decisions explicit, allowing to find out later why which decisions were taken. The assessment process is reproducible and documented by a graphical representation of the most important aspects underlying architecture assessment: system architecture, assessment criteria, and system workload.