Peter Knauber

PuLSE: a methodology to develop software product lines

Software product lines have recently been introduced as one of the most promising advances for efficient software development. Yet upon close examination, there are few guidelines or methodologies available to develop and deploy product lines beyond existing domain engineering approaches. The latter have had mixed success within commercial enterprises because of their deployment complexity, lack of customizability, and especially their misplaced focus, that is on domains as opposed to products. To tackle these problems we developed the PuLSETM (Product Line Software Engineering) methodology for the purpose of enabling the conception and deployment of software product lines within a large variety of enterprise contexts. This is achieved via product-centric focus throughout the phases of PuLSETM, customizability of its components, incremental introduction capability, maturity scale for structured evolution, and adaptations to a few main product development situations. PuLSETM is the result of a bottom-up effort: the methodology captures and leverages the results (the lessons learned) from our technology transfer activities with our industrial customers. We present in this paper the main ideas behind PuLSETM and illustrate the methodology with a running example taken from our transfer experience.

Applying Product Line Concepts in Small and Medium-Sized Companies

Small and medium-sized enterprises work under heavy constraints: They need to be very flexible and fast in their reaction to customer requests, thus limiting their possibility for long-term planning. In a partially publicly funded project, the authors have started to apply their Product Line Software Engineering method developed at Fraunhofer IESE, in six small and medium-sized companies addressing six different domains. The article presents first experience and lessons learned from 24 months of project work; including first results within the companies.

PuLSE-DSSA—a method for the development of software reference architectures

Jean-Marc DeBaud Oliver Flege Peter Knauber Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) Software Engineering (IESE) Software Engineering (IESE) Sauetwiesen 6 Sauerwiesen 6 Sauetwiesen 6 D-67661 Kaiserslautern, Germany D-67661 Kaiserslautern, Germany D-67661 Kaiserslautern, Germany debaud @ iese.fhg.de flege@ iese.fhg.de knauber@iese.fhg.de

Synergy between component-based and generative approaches

Building software systems out of pre-fabricated components is a very attractive vision. Distributed Component Platforms (DCP) and their visual development environments bring this vision closer to reality than ever. At the same time, some experiences with component libraries warn us about potential problems that arise in case of software system families or systems that evolve over many years of changes. Indeed, implementation level components, when affected by many independent changes, tend to grow in both size and number, impeding reuse. In this paper, we analyze in detail this effect and propose a program construction environment, based on generative techniques, to help in customization and evolution of component-based systems. This solution allows us to reap benefits of DCPs during runtime and, at the same time, keep components under control during system construction and evolution. In the paper, we describe such a construction environment for component-based systems that we built with a commercial generator and illustrate its features with examples from our domain engineering project. The main lesson learnt from our project is that generative techniques can extend the strengths of the component-based approach in two important ways: Firstly, generative techniques automate routine component customization and composition tasks and allow developers work more productively, at a higher abstraction level. Secondly, as custom components with required properties are generated on demand, we do not need to store and manage multiple versions of components, components do not overly grow in size, helping developers keep the complexity of an evolving system under control.

ISSUES AND MODELS IN SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINES

Software product lines are one of the most promising fields in software engineering. They aim at the synergistic construction of software products. A successful introduction of software product lines requires three essential ingredients: a business analysis of the overall advantages that can come from product lines, the definition of a systematic process for product lines development, and the definition of general models, in a standard format, which can guide the development process.

Software product lines (workshop session): economics, architectures, and applications

Research has been conducted in software product lines for the past few years. Some of it has focused on demonstrating that existing systems and approaches were indeed instrumental for product line development, such as generative techniques, domain analysis and engineering and software components. Another portion of the research effort has tried to determine how it is possible to create a comprehensive methodology and an associated tool for product lines, starting from the business idea of line of products down to the development of a product and trying to exploit all the possible synergies existing at each phase, from network externalities to component reuse.

Session Report on Product Issues in Product Family Engineering

This report gives an overview of the session on product issues of the 4th International Workshop on Product Family Engineering. It briefly sketches the issues presented in the technical session and summarizes the results and open issues of the subsequent discussion session.

Second ICSE workshop on software product lines: economics, architectures, and applications

1 SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP Following the remarkable successes of the “First International Workshop on Software product lines: economics, architectures, and implications” held at ICSE 2000 in Limerick, and of the “Second International Workshop on Software product lines: economics, architectures, and implications” held at ICSE 2001 in Toronto, this workshop aims at sharing conceptual and practical experience by establishing contacts and starting the discussion between experts and practitioners from academia and industry.