Software Product Line Practice Research Articles

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.

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.