Product Line Engineering

Product line engineering (PLE) is one of the few industry-ready methods to manage reuse and variability in a defined way and thus bring software development maturity to a more advanced stage. The goal is to deliver specific product variants with fast cycle times at a manageable life-cycle cost with a defined quality level. Many IT and software organizations have started PLE but fail in industrializing the concepts and thus do not achieve sustainable benefits. Authors Klaus Schmid and Eduardo Santana de Almeida look at current technology for modeling and managing variation and thus facilitate PLE. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/R1gybFwAy10 is a video interview with David Weiss discussing the benefits of using software product line engineering to produce software families.