Similarity Analysis within Product Line Scoping: An Evaluation of a Semi-automatic Approach

Abstract. Introducing a product line approach in an organization requires a systematic scoping phase to decide what products and features should be included. Product line scoping is a non-trivial activity and traditionally consumes a lot of time and resources. This issue highlights the need to complement traditional scoping activities with semi-automatic approaches that allow to initially estimate the potential for reuse with small efforts. In this paper we present an evaluation of a tool-supported approach that enables the semi-automatic analysis of existing products in order to calculate their similarity. This approach is tailored to be used within the configuration-based systems domain, where we have used it to identify similarity within two types of industrial standard software products. The results of this evaluation highlight that our approach provides accurate results and leads to time savings compared to manual similarity analysis. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07881-6_12 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-99861 Originally published at: Nöbauer, Markus; Seyff, Norbert; Groher, Iris (2014). Similarity analysis within product line scoping: An evaluation of a semi-automatic approach. In: Jarke, Matthias; Mylopoulos, John; Quix, Christoph; Rolland, Colette; Manolopoulos, Yannis; Mouratidis, Haralambos; Horkoff, Jennifer. Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 165-179. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07881-6_12 Similarity Analysis within Product Line Scoping: An Evaluation of a Semi-Automatic Approach Markus Nöbauer, Norbert Seyff , Iris Groher 1 InsideAx GmbH, 4031 Linz, Austria [email protected] 2 University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] 3 Johannes Kepler University (JKU), 4020 Linz, Austria