A Comparison of Software Product Line Scoping Approaches

During the past decade a number of methods and techniques for software product line scoping have been developed. Although their basic goal is the same, when it comes to details it is often hard to see what they have in common, where they differ and what their strengths and weaknesses are. This makes it difficult for the user to decide when and how to use them because these methods and techniques sometimes describe the same concepts and activities with different terminologies and, more often than not, by that the activities and tasks defined in them do not exactly match with each other and their inputs/outcomes are not clearly defined. In this paper, we compare and analyze the mainstream approaches to software product line scoping, deduce their essential components and develop them into a unified approach that can be easily referred to and utilized by the user companies planning to launch product lines.