A practical guide to product line scoping

Over the last years scoping has been established as the initial activity for starting product line engineering. To be successful in defining the right scope for more than 5 years in industrial projects, we always had to customize our generic scoping process to the organizational context, projects constraints, available artifacts, and resources. In this paper, we present an update of the scoping process that explicitly integrates 21 customization factors. In our experience customization of scoping is crucial to the overall product line success, since the scope is the basis for all further product line activities.