An Approach for Developing Groupware Product Lines Based on the 3C Collaboration Model

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are a new software engineering technology that aims at promoting reduced time and costs in the development of system families by the exploitation of applications commonalities. Given that different Groupware applications typically share a lot of functionalities, Groupware Product Lines (GPLs) have emerged to incorporate SPL benefits to the Groupware development. In this paper, we propose an approach for developing GPLs, which incorporates SPL techniques to allow the derivation of customized groupware according to specific contexts and the systematic reuse of software assets. Our approach is based on the 3C Collaboration Model that allows identifying collaboration needs and guiding the user to select appropriate features according to their collaboration purpose. A GPL of Learning Object repositories, named FLOCOS GPL, is used to illustrate the proposed approach.