Non-functional Properties in Software Product Lines: A Taxonomy for Classification

In the recent years, the software product lines paradigm has gained interest in both industry and academia. As in traditional software development, the concept of quality is crucial for the success of software product line practices and both functional and nonfunctional characteristics must be involved in the development process in order to achieve a high quality software product line. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of quality-based approaches in order to address non-functional properties in software product line development. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for employing non-functional properties in software product lines development. The taxonomy not only highlights the major concerns that need to be addressed in the area of quality-based software product lines, but also helps to identify various research gaps that need to be filled in future work in this area.