A Collaborative Approach for Product Line Scoping: a Case Study in Collaboration Engineering

Collaboration engineering facilitates the design of work practices for mission-critical tasks which are performed by groups rather than individuals. For example, product line scoping is a complex task which must balance the interests of stakeholders representing market, financial, and technical issues simultaneously with technical constraints arising from the reuse of typically complex legacy systems. Existing scoping approaches provide thorough guidelines but do not emphasize the collaborative aspects of this process. We propose a collaborative product line scoping approach for reengineering-based product line adoption which is based on involving success-critical stakeholders to balance business and technical concerns. The approach builds on guidelines and patterns from collaboration engineering and practices of existing scoping approaches. Our research also tests the usefulness and applicability of collaboration engineering concepts and its process design framework.