Understanding the software product line derivation process: an industrial example

Software Product Line Engineering has emerged as a software engineering strategy aimed at helping industry achieve business goals. Nevertheless, in order to ensure the return of invest-ment with the Software Product Line (SPL) approach, a well-defined Product Derivation (PD) process is important. Without this process, the products are instantiated in an ad-hoc manner with success relying on the effort of a few individual members. This may increase the produc-tion costs and time-to-market. Despite its importance, when compared to the vast amount of research on developing product lines, relatively little work has been dedicated to the process of product derivation. Additional-ly, there are few available reports about how software development organizations derive their products from a product line. Thus, this study presents the findings gathered through to the case study methodology in or-der to enhance understanding of how product derivation is performed in industrial settings, in-cluding its key phases and activities in the product derivation proces

The importance of documentation, design and reuse in risk management for SPL

Software Product Lines (SPL) is a methodology focusing on systematic software reuse, multiple benefits have been reported as a result of this type of software development. However, establishing a SPL is not a simple task. It is a challenging activity raising many challenges for engineering and management. This research aims to manage the risks during SPL development to provide traceability among them. For this, it is important that the risks are documented and there is a common design related to them. As solution, we identified the strengths and weakness in SPL development and the importance in designing of communication for risk documentation

Software product line scoping and requirements engineering in a small and medium-sized enterprise:an industrial case study

Software Product Line (SPL) engineering has been applied in several domains, especially in large-scale software development. Given the benefits experienced and reported, SPL engineering has increasingly garnered interest from small to medium-sized companies. It is possible to find a wide range of studies reporting on the challenges of running a SPL project in large companies. However, very little reports exist that consider the situation for small to medium-sized enterprises and these studies try develop universal truths for SPL without lessons learned from empirical evidence need to be contextualized. This study is a step towards bridging this gap in contextual evidence by characterizing the weaknesses discovered in the Scoping (SC) and Requirements (RE) disciplines of SPL. Moreover, in this study we conducted a case study in a Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to justify the use of agile methods when introducing the SPL SC and RE disciplines through the characterization of their bottlenecks. The results of the characterization indicated that ineffective communication and collaboration, long iteration cycles, and the absence of adaptability and flexibility can increase the effort and reduce motivation during project development. These issues can be mitigated by agile methods