workshops

sunday

Many organizations that produce related software products within a specific market have discovered that they can amortize their technology investments across those products by adopting a product-line approach. A product line is a group of products sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy specific needs of a selected market.

The potential costs and benefits associated with a product line are substantial. For software-intensive systems, a product line approach involves a sizable initial investment plus continuing maintenance costs. However, the potential benefits include reduced time to market, improved schedule and cost predictability, and improved product quality.

The architecture is the technical foundation that supports the product line. Architecture-based development is a process that utilizes the software architecture as the primary tool for the design, evolution, implementation, management, migration, and understanding of a software system.

Architecture-based development includes: understanding and modeling the domain requirements, developing or selecting the architecture, representing and communicating the architecture, evaluating the architecture, organizing the work products around the architecture, and adhering to the architecture throughout implementation and maintenance.

The dual life cycle approach utilizes, implicitly or explicitly, domain and application engineering. Domain engineering produces the reusable assets for the product line (including the architecture), while application engineering produces a specific product from those reusable assets.

Although we recognize that the organizational, business, and market factors are vital to the success of a product line, the focus of the workshop is technical. Further, we are primarily interested in the experiences of the participants in the application of object technologies to a software product line. The problems to be addressed include:

• What object technologies are being used to support a product line approach?
• What are the associated costs and benefits?
• What results and measures have been collected? Have these results been validated?
• What were the technical risks? How were they mitigated?
• What technical issues remain open?

Organizers:

Gary Chastek, Software Engineering Institute
Email: gjc@sei.cmu.edu  

Felix Bachmann, Carnegie Bosch Institute
Patrick Donohoe, Software Engineering Institute