• Product-line scoping
• Requirements elicitation, analysis, and management
• Architectural style exploration
• Exploration of the production plan

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 proposed workshop is the combination of two successful OOPSLA workshops from last year: the "Object Technology, Architectures, and Domain Analysis" workshop and the "Object Technology and Product Lines" workshop. Over the past two years these workshops have addressed issues such as:

• The impact of the Unified Modeling Language on product line development.
• Techniques for the evolution of a product line.
• The types of knowledge representation used for a product line.
• Domain modeling and its mapping to a software architecture.
• The potential impact of subject and aspect-oriented programming on product line development.
• Tool-kit and architecture based development.
• The costs and benefits associated with active artifacts.

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 analysis. The problems to be addressed include:

• What object technologies are being used to support a product line analysis?
• 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

Sholom Cohen, Software Engineering Institute

Felix Bachmann, Carnegie Bosch Institute