An Iterative Model for Agile Product Line Engineering

Agile software development (ASD) and software product line engineering (SPLE) seem to be two rewarding yet disparate schools of thoughts in software engineering. ASD encourages strong business involvement in development activities, focuses only on the requirements at hand, and deems huge investment in requirement and design upfront unjustifiable. On the other hand, SPLE considers intensive domain analysis and flexible & detailed software design as prerequisites to any development effort. SPLE plans for potential future projects, and dedicates considerable resources for preplanning efforts. Integrating ASD and SPLE, although is challenging, has a huge potential of magnifying enhancements in quality, cuts in cost and reductions in time-to-market. In this paper, we present our research on this integration. We propose a model that enables agile organizations to establish product lines without disturbing the agility of their practices. The model is a bottom-up application-driven approach that relies on automated tests to derive core assets from existing code.