A systematic literature review on the semi-automatic configuration of extended product lines

Product line engineering has become essential in mass customisation given its ability to reduce production costs and time to market, and to improve product quality and customer satisfaction. In product line literature, mass customisation is known as product configuration. Currently, there are multiple heterogeneous contributions in the product line configuration domain. However, a secondary study that shows an overview of the progress, trends, and gaps faced by researchers in this domain is still missing. In this context, we provide a comprehensive systematic literature review to discover which approaches exist to support the configuration process of extended product lines and how these approaches perform in practice. Extend product lines consider non-functional properties in the product line modelling. We compare and classify a total of 66 primary studies from 2000 to 2016. Mainly, we give an in-depth view of techniques used by each work, how these techniques are evaluated and their main shortcomings. As main results, our review identified (i) the need to improve the quality of the evaluation of existing approaches, (ii) a lack of hybrid solutions to support multiple configuration constraints, and (iii) a need to improve scalability and performance conditions

Towards product configuration taking into account quality concerns

The configuration of concrete products from a product line infrastructure is the process of resolving the variability captured in the product line according to a company's market strategy or specific customer's requirements. Several aspects influence the selection of features for a concrete product, such as dependencies and constraints between features, the different stakeholders involved in the process, the desired degree of quality, and cost constraints. This paper presents the vision of a configurator that will focus on providing indicators of security and performance for features and empowering its users to interactively observe the effect of the selected set of features on these two quality characteristics. We propose the use of reusable expert knowledge and static analysis for obtaining the indicators of security and performance, respectively. The two main issues to be investigated are: (1) to which degree the configuration process should be automated; and (2) how exactly to obtain indicators of security and performance for features that can be used to predict the security and performance of whole configurations