Software product line reuse in practice

The study of software product line addresses the issues of engineering software systems families, or collections of similar software systems. The objective of a software product line is to reduce the overall engineering effort required to produce a collection of similar systems by capitalizing on the commonality among the systems and by formally managing the variation among the systems. This is a classic software reuse problem (C. Krueger, 1992). The primary focus of software product line research has been on domain analysis and modeling, architecture modeling, software reuse repositories, generators, and process definition. In contrast, for engineering single systems, these technologies and techniques provide significant value, while for engineering software product lines the conventional wisdom suggests they are essential. We hypothesize, however, that domain analysis, architecture modeling, software reuse repositories, generators, and process definition are simply compensating for a void in the existing software engineering technology space and that this void can be filled by a more simple, powerful, and concise technology for engineering software product lines. This new technology then redefines the status of domain analysis and the other existing technologies so that they have the same status in software product line development that they do in single system development: valuable engineering technologies but not necessarily requisite.