Perspectives on Software Product Lines

Research has been conducted in software product lines for the past few years. Some of it has focused on demonstrating that existing systems and approaches were indeed instrumental for product line development, such as generative techniques, domain analysis and engineering and software components. Another portion of the research effort has tried to determine how it is possible to create a comprehensive methodology and an associated tool for product lines, starting from the business idea of line of products down to the development of a product and trying to exploit all the possible synergies existing at each phase, from network externalities to component reuse.