Product Line Practices Research Articles

A feature-based personalized recommender system for product-line configuration

Today’s competitive marketplace requires the industry to understand unique and particular needs of their customers. Product line practices enable companies to create individual products for every customer by providing an interdependent set of features. Users configure personalized products by consecutively selecting desired features based on their individual needs. However, as most features are interdependent, users must understand the impact of their gradual selections in order to make valid decisions. Thus, especially when dealing with large feature models, specialized assistance is needed to guide the users in configuring their product. Recently, recommender systems have proved to be an appropriate mean to assist users in finding information and making decisions. In this paper, we propose an advanced feature recommender system that provides personalized recommendations to users. In detail, we offer four main contributions: (i) We provide a recommender system that suggests relevant features to ease the decision-making process. (ii) Based on this system, we provide visual support to users that guides them through the decision-making process and allows them to focus on valid and relevant parts of the configuration space. (iii) We provide an interactive open-source configurator tool encompassing all those features. (iv) In order to demonstrate the performance of our approach, we compare three different recommender algorithms in two real case studies derived from business experience.

Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Successful Software Product Line Practices

A software product line is a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way in place. Organizations adopting product development strategies that include a software product line have achieved impressive results, reducing product cycle time and increasing productivity by an order of magnitude. The software product line strategy is a blend of business and technical actions that lets an organization satisfy a wide range of customers, gain leverage with suppliers, meet the threats of substitute products, and deter other companies seeking to enter the market. The strategy is robust over a wide range of technologies, domains, and organizations of different structures, cultures, and goals. Service-oriented architectures, agile development methods, and open source business models have all played roles in successful product line organizations.

Current state and potential of variability management practices in software-intensive SMEs: Results from a regional industrial survey

Context More and more, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are using software to augment the functionality of their products and offerings. Variability management of software is becoming an interesting topic for SMEs with expanding portfolios and increasingly complex product structures. While the use of software product lines to resolve high variability is well known in larger organizations, there is less known about the practices in SMEs. Objective This paper presents results from a survey of software developing SMEs. The purpose of the paper is to provide a snapshot of the current awareness and practices of variability modeling in organizations that are developing software with the constraints present in SMEs. Method A survey with questions regarding the variability practices was distributed to software developing organizations in a region of Sweden that has many SMEs. The response rate was 13% and 25 responses are used in this analysis. Results We find that, although there are SMEs that develop implicit software product lines and have relatively sophisticated variability structures for their solution space, the structures of the problem space and the product space have room for improvement. Conclusions The answers in the survey indicate that SMEs are in situations where they can benefit from more structured variability management, but the awareness need to be raised. Even though the problem space similarity is high, there is little reuse and traceability activities performed. The existence of SMEs with qualified variability management and product line practices indicates that small organizations are capable to apply such practices.

A quality-based cost estimation model for the product line life cycle

In reusing common organizational assets, the software product line (SPL) provides substantial business opportunities for reducing the unit cost of similar products, improving productivity, reducing time to market, and promoting customer satisfaction [4]. By adopting effective product line practices, return on investment (ROI) becomes increasingly critical in the decision-making process. The majority of SPL cost estimation and ROI models [5-9] confine themselves to software development costs and savings. However, if software quality cost is considered in the spectrum of the SPL < life cycle, product lines can result in considerably larger payoffs, compared to non-product lines. This article proposes a quality-based product line life cycle cost estimation model, called qCOPLIMO, and investigates the effect of software quality cost on the ROI ofSPL. qCOPLIMO is derived from two COCOMO suite models: COPLIMO and COQUALMO, as presented in Figure 1. COPLIMO [2] provides a baseline cost estimation model of the product line life cycle, and COQUALMO [3] estimates the number of residual defects. These models are used to estimate software quality cost. Both models are an extension of COCOMO II [1].

New methods in software product line practice

Examining the benefits of next-generation SPL methods.

Institutionalization of software product line: An empirical investigation of key organizational factors

A good fit between the person and the organization is essential in a better organizational performance. This is even more crucial in case of institutionalization of a software product line practice within an organization. Employees’ participation, organizational behavior and management contemplation play a vital role in successfully institutionalizing software product lines in a company. Organizational dimension has been weighted as one of the critical dimensions in software product line theory and practice. A comprehensive empirical investigation to study the impact of some organizational factors on the performance of software product line practice is presented in this work. This is the first study to empirically investigate and demonstrate the relationships between some of the key organizational factors and software product line performance of an organization. The results of this investigation provide empirical evidence and further support the theoretical foundations that in order to institutionalize software product lines within an organization, organizational factors play an important role.

Product Line의 컨텍스트 기반 측정 지표 도출 방법

Software development based on product lines has been proved a promising technology that can drastically reduce cycle time and guarantee quality by strategically reusing quality core assets that belong to an organization. However, how to measure within a product line is different from how to measure within a single software project in that we have to consider the aspects of both core assets and projects that utilize the assets. Moreover, the performance aspects of overall project lines need to be considered within a product line context. Therefore, a systematic approach to measure the performance of product lines is essential to have consistent, repeatable and effective measures within a product line. This paper presents a context-based measurements elicitation approach for product lines that reflects the performance characteristics of product lines and the diversity of their application. The approach includes both detailed procedures and work products resulting from implementation of the procedures, along with their templates. To show the utility of the approach, this paper presents the elicited measurements, especially for technical management practices among product line practices. This paper also illustrated a real application case that adopt this approach. The systematic approach enables management attributes, i.e., measurements to be identified when we construct product lines or develop software product based on the product lines. The measurements will be effective in that they are derived in consideration of the application context and interests of stakeholders.

A Product Line engineering practices model

This paper describes work in progress towards the elaboration of a Product Line practices model that combines concepts proposed by various authors. The strengths of existing Product Line frameworks and models are summarized and a new model is proposed in the form of 31 Product Line practice areas, grouped in five categories. An important objective of this Product Line practices model is that it should be easily incorporated into existing development methodologies, while remaining aligned with existing systems engineering standards.

Highlights from the DoD product line practice workshop product lines

article Free Access Share on Highlights from the DoD product line practice workshop product lines: bridging the gap—commercial success to DoD practice Author: Will Tracz View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering NotesVolume 23Issue 3May 1998 pp 29–31https://doi.org/10.1145/279437.279448Published:01 May 1998Publication History 0citation164DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads164Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF