A Business Maturity Model of Software Product Line Engineering

In the recent past, software product line engineering has become one of the most promising practices in software industry with the potential to substantially increase the software development productivity. Software product line engineering approach spans the dimensions of business, architecture, software engineering process and organization. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents a business maturity model of software product line, which is a methodology to evaluate the current maturity of the business dimension of a software product line in an organization. This model examines the coordination between product line engineering and the business aspects of software product line. It evaluates the maturity of the business dimension of software product line as a function of how a set of business practices are aligned with product line engineering in an organization. Using the model presented in this paper, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results. This research contributes towards establishing a comprehensive and unified strategy for a process maturity evaluation of software product lines

Variability and Evolution in Systems of Systems

In this position paper (1) we discuss two particular aspects of Systems of Systems, i.e., variability and evolution. (2) We argue that concepts from Product Line Engineering and Software Evolution are relevant to Systems of Systems Engineering. (3) Conversely, concepts from Systems of Systems Engineering can be helpful in Product Line Engineering and Software Evolution. Hence, we argue that an exchange of concepts between the disciplines would be beneficial.Comment: In Proceedings AiSoS 2013, arXiv:1311.319

Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version