On the Evolution of Software and Systems Product Line Standards

Abstract

Software product lines (SPL) have evolved from being a niche research topic to a well-established approach towards development of a family of software-intensive systems, promising better quality in shorter time and less cost. The hall of fame initiative of a 16 year running conference on SPL recognizes exemplary examples of successful application of SPL in practice. However, despite these advances, SPL are seen as quite effort intensive requiring huge initial investments and are not considered as mainstream software development. One of the primary reasons for this is the lack of standardized tools and methods to support development, maintenance and management of SPL. Specifically, every software product line is considered as a stand-alone project with custom tools and methods developed in most of the cases. This leads to a number of diversified, inconsistent and incompatible tools making it difficult to develop new tools or to choose from existing set of tools. It is here that the working group 4 (WG4) of the seventh subcommittee (SC7) titled "Software and Systems Engineering" of the Joint ISO/IEC Technical Committee (JTC1) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has proposed a set of interrelated standards in the area of software and systems product lines (SSPL). In this report, we briefly outline the stateof-the-art in software product line tools and motivate the need for standardized tools and methods. We then provide an overview of SSPL standards based on our experience in the last several years. We finally conclude by inviting the entire software engineering community and practitioners to get involved in the critical analysis and creation of SSPLstandards and propel their use in both academia and industry.