This paper examines possibilities and consequences of introducing variability with respect to pricing, accounting, and way of payment into software product lines for developers, vendors, and customers. The global goal is the derivation of an extensible conceptual framework for vendors of SPLs which adds relevant economic variability to the SPL. The capability of economic methods for pricing and...

There was much interest at this year’s Software Product Line Conference in how to combine agile and product line techniques. Agile teams seek to address change one product at a time while product line organizations take an investment view by addressing change among a set of products. On the surface there are some seeming contradictions between the methods, but they may not be as different as th...

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available with respect to the evolution of the products, the software components and the software architectur...

In order to develop high quality products with lower cost and in a shorter time according to the conventional methods, Concurrent Engineering techniques should be applied on projects. Concurrent Engineering discipline requires a collaborative way of working of relevant departments in a factory. With a view to manage all product data collaboratively and to give related information to different d...

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 compre...

Software Product Lines (SPL) offer tremendous potential to improve a company’s competitive position and responsiveness to changing market needs. However, unless the full benefits and costs are well understood by executive-level stakeholders, the probability of success will be low. An SPL economic analysis framework is presented that is based on the author’s experience with SPL adoption at Conve...

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Research on computer-supported configuration of customizable products and services is currently carried out in two main communities: one community is mainly focused on the configuration of hardware artifacts, the other one is interested in configurable software systems and software product lines. Despite the significant overlap in research interests, the fields have mainly evolved in isolation ...

Techniques to model software product lines (SPLs), using feature models, usually focus on a single SPL. Larger SPLs can also be built from smaller SPLs which results in a dependency between the involved SPLs, i.e., one SPL uses functionality provided by another SPL. Currently, this can be described using constraints between the involved feature models. However, if multiple differently configure...