This book covers research into the most important practices in product line organization. Contributors offer experience-based knowledge on the domain and application engineering, the modeling and management of variability, and the design and use of tools to support the management of product line-related knowledge.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2005, held in Rennes, France in September 2005, emanating from the merger of the former events SPLC (Software Product Line Conference started 2000 in the USA) and PFE (Product Family Engineering started 1996 in Europe). The 17 revised full technical papers presented together with 3 short research papers and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on keynotes, feature modelling, re-engineering, short papers, strategies, panels, validation, scoping and architecture, and product derivation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2004, held in Boston, MA, USA in August/September 2004. The 18 revised full technical papers presented together with a keynote abstract and summaries of panels, tutorials, and workshops were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Organized in sections on business, architecture, and quality assurance, the papers address topics ranging from how to start a software product line in a company, to case studies of mature product lines and the technology used, to test strategies of product lines, to strategies and notations for creating product line architectures, and to the importance of binding times in creating product lines.

Software product lines are emerging as a critical new paradigm for software development. Product lines are enabling organizations to achieve impressive time-to-market gains and cost reductions. With the increasing number of product lines and product-line researchers and practitioners, the time is right for a comprehensive examination of the issues surrounding the software product line approach. The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is proud to sponsor the first conference on this important subject. This book comprises the proceedings of the First Software Product Line Conference (SPLC1), held August 28-31, 2000, in Denver, Colorado, USA. The twenty-seven papers of the conference technical program present research results and experience reports that cover all aspects of software product lines. Topics include business issues, enabling technologies, organizational issues, and life-cycle issues. Emphasis is placed on experiences in the development and fielding of product lines of complex systems, especially those that expose problems in the design, development, or evolution of software product lines. The book will be essential reading for researchers and practitioners alike.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2004, held in Boston, MA, USA in August/September 2004. The 18 revised full technical papers presented together with a keynote abstract and summaries of panels, tutorials, and workshops were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Organized in sections on business, architecture, and quality assurance, the papers address topics ranging from how to start a software product line in a company, to case studies of mature product lines and the technology used, to test strategies of product lines, to strategies and notations for creating product line architectures, and to the importance of binding times in creating product lines.

Software product lines are emerging as an important new paradigm for so- ware development. Product lines are enabling organizations to achieve impressive time-to-market gains and cost reductions. In 1997, we at the Software Engine- ing Institute (SEI) launched a Product Line Practice Initiative. Our vision was that product line development would be a low-risk, high-return proposition for the entire software engineering community. It was our hope from the beginning that there would eventually be su?cient interest to hold a conference. The First Software Product Line Conference (SPLC1) was the realization of that hope. Since SPLC1, we have seen a growing interest in software product lines. Companies are launching their own software product line initiatives, product line technical and business practices are maturing, product line tool vendors are emerging, and books on product lines are being published. Motivated by the enthusiastic response to SPLC1 and the increasing number of software product lines and product line researchers and practitioners, the SEI is proud to sponsor this second conference dedicated to software product lines. We were grati?ed by the submissions to SPLC2 from all parts of the globe, from government and commercial organizations. From these submissions we were able to assemble a rich and varied conference program with unique opportunities for software product line novices, experts, and those in between. This collection represents the papers selected from that response and includes research and experience reports.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2010, held on Jeju Island, South Korea, in September 2010.

While standardization has empowered the software industry to substantially scale software development and to provide affordable software to a broad market, it often does not address smaller market segments, nor the needs and wishes of individual customers. Software product lines reconcile mass production and standardization with mass customization in software engineering. Ideally, based on a set of reusable parts, a software manufacturer can generate a software product based on the requirements of its customer. The concept of features is central to achieving this level of automation, because features bridge the gap between the requirements the customer has and the functionality a product provides. Thus features are a central concept in all phases of product-line development. The authors take a developer’s viewpoint, focus on the development, maintenance, and implementation of product-line variability, and especially concentrate on automated product derivation based on a user’s feature selection. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides a general introduction to feature-oriented software product lines, describing the product-line approach and introducing the product-line development process with its two elements of domain and application engineering. The pivotal part II covers a wide variety of implementation techniques including design patterns, frameworks, components, feature-oriented programming, and aspect-oriented programming, as well as tool-based approaches including preprocessors, build systems, version-control systems, and virtual separation of concerns. Finally, part III is devoted to advanced topics related to feature-oriented product lines like refactoring, feature interaction, and analysis tools specific to product lines. In addition, an appendix lists various helpful tools for software product-line development, along with a description of how they relate to the topics covered in this book. To tie the book together, the authors use two running examples that are well documented in the product-line literature: data management for embedded systems, and variations of graph data structures. They start every chapter by explicitly stating the respective learning goals and finish it with a set of exercises; additional teaching material is also available online. All these features make the book ideally suited for teaching – both for academic classes and for professionals interested in self-study.

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. Here, the authors combine academic research results with real-world industrial experiences, thus presenting a broad view on product line engineering so that both managers and technical specialists will benefit from exposure to this work. 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.

This handbook distils the wealth of expertise and knowledge from a large community of researchers and industrial practitioners in Software Product Lines (SPLs) gained through extensive and rigorous theoretical, empirical, and applied research. It is a timely compilation of well-established and cutting-edge approaches that can be leveraged by those facing the prevailing and daunting challenge of re-engineering their systems into SPLs. The selection of chapters provides readers with a wide and diverse perspective that reflects the complementary and varied expertise of the chapter authors. This perspective covers the re-engineering processes, from planning to execution. SPLs are families of systems that share common assets, allowing a disciplined software reuse. The adoption of SPL practices has shown to enable significant technical and economic benefits for the companies that employ them. However, successful SPLs rarely start from scratch, but instead, they usually start from a set of existing systems that must undergo well-defined re-engineering processes to unleash new levels of productivity and competitiveness. Practitioners will benefit from the lessons learned by the community, captured in the array of methodological and technological alternatives presented in the chapters of the handbook, and will gain the confidence for undertaking their own re-engineering challenges. Researchers and educators will find a valuable single-entry point to quickly become familiar with the state-of-the-art on the topic and the open research opportunities; including undergraduate, graduate students, and R&D engineers who want to have a comprehensive understanding of techniques in reverse engineering and re-engineering of variability-rich software systems.