Perspectives on Software Product Lines

Abstract

Product line engineering is a recent concept and one of the hottest topics in software engineering aiming at synergy effects in software development. Diverse benefits like cost reduction, decreased time-to-market, and quality improvement can be expected from reuse of domain-specific software assets, several successful product line projects have been performed and documented [3]. Also non-technical benefits as result of network externalities, product branding, and sharing organizational costs have been observed.Following the remarkable success of the "First International Workshop on Software Product Lines: Economics, Architectures, and Implications" held at ICSE 2000 in Limerick [1], this second workshop stresses more the non-technical, that is, business and organizational aspects of product line adoption and institutionalization. Another major topic of interest are product line tools, as tool support seems to become more and more critical for the success of product line approaches. Different tool concepts have been proposed and discussed during the workshop. Requirements for tools and respective solutions seem to become more concrete, maybe resulting from the fact that the technical concepts and solutions of product line approaches are better understood and can therefore be better supported with tools.The strong emphasis on establishing contacts and giving experts and practitioners from academia and industry a platform for discussion has been continued during this second workshop.Section 2 of this workshop summary describes the formal structure of the workshop. In Section 3, a short summary of the invited talk on issues and opportunities in product line research is given. Section 4 summarizes key points of the presentations of the workshop participants that were given based on their submitted papers that are fully available at [2]. In Section 5, the plenary discussion is described and its major lessons learned are summarized. Section 6 concludes this paper.