Software Product Lines from Customer to Code

The process of establishing a software product line and instantiating products from it is motivated, not only by technical reasons, but also by business reasons. The customer perspective reveals the importance of the basic function of the products and helps us distinguish between product lines and product families. One single feature is never the only difference between two products, but instead we can identify products on different feature levels. When designing the product we identify that it is important to separate between conceptual components of the domain and factual components that are part of the solution. Product lines must eventually lead to implementation and source code. In order to achieve this, a wide range of implementation techniques is available. Which combination of techniques that is the most appropriate is very much dependent on if the product is part of a product line or a product family, and how the factual component relate to the other factual components. Hence, to be successful in developing software product lines requires the application of knowledge about both the customer and the code.