Software Product Lines

1. Software Product Lines Krishna Anusha, Eturi

2. Introduction: • A software product line is a set of software systems developed by a company that share a common set of core requirements necessary for the developing a product with some known or allowable variations.

3. What is SPL? • It is the process of developing related systems from common assets or common assets [2]. • Core assets : • The core assets include the architecture, reusable components, documentations, process descriptions etc [1].

4. Activities in the SPL: • Core Asset Development, • Product Development, • Management.

5. Fig.1 Three activities of SPL

6. Core Asset Development: • It includes the development of production capability by taking inputs and resulting outputs accordingly. • The inputs and outputs are affected by each other as this process is iterative.

7. Fig 2. Core Asset Development

8. The inputs of the core assets development are: • Product constraints, • Styles, patterns, frameworks, • Production constraints, • Production strategy, • Inventory of preexisting assets. • The outputs of core assets development are: • Core assets, • Product line scope, • Production plan.

9. Product Development: • In the product development, the inputs include the requirements, product line scope and the core assets [5]. • The output is the product itself.

10. Fig 3. Production Development

11. Management: • The management includes two levels. They are: • The organizational level and • The technical level.

12. Fig 4. Management

13. Software Product Line practice areas: • A practice area is the body of work or set of activities. • Some of the practice areas defined for the product line concepts such as: • Software engineering practices area, • Organizational or Technical management.

14. Software engineering practice areas include the following: • Architecture definition, • Requirements engineering, • Testing, • Understanding relevant domains etc.

15. Technical management practice areas includes the following: • Process definition, • Technical risk management, • Tool support etc.

16. The Organizational management practice areas include: • Funding, • Market analysis, • Organizational planning, • Training etc.

17. What are Product Line patterns: • The patterns include ways to define similar contexts and problem/solution pairs. • The practice areas are put into practices using the product line patterns [1].

18. Advantages of Software Product Line: • Achieve productivity gains, • Improve time to market, • Exploit economies of scope through reuse of common assets [4], • Enhance the predictability of software development processes, • Improve software quality.

19. Conclusion: • Future directions of Software Product Line are: • The future directions of the Software Product Line is heading towards development of more strategic methods. • Minimizing the short comes of the first generation methodologies, which used manual application engineering. This way, the dynamic software product lines are being developed [6]. • The software mass customization is one of the development methodologies which focus on domain engineering of reusable assets [3].

20. References: [1] L. M. Northrop,” SEI’s Software Product Line Tenets”, IEEE Software, Vol. 19, I. 4, P. 32-40, 2002. [2] P. Donohoe, "Introduction to Software Product Lines", 12th International Software Product Line Conference, P.370 - 370, 2008. [3] C. W. K. Krueger, “New methods in Software Product Line Development”, 10th International Software Product Line conference, 2006. [4] C.W.Krueger,"Software product line reuse in practice",3rd IEEE Symposium on Application-Specific Systems and Software Engineering Technology, Proceedings, P.117 - 118, 2000. [5] J. Zhang, X. Cai, G. Liu, "The Role of Aspects in Software Product Lines", International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology, P. 588-592, 2008.

21. References contd.. [6] M. Kim, S. Park, “Goal and Scenario Driven Product Line Development”, IEEE Computer Society, 2004.

22. Questions?

23. Thank you