Facilitating the Development of Software Product Lines in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are Software Engineering methodologies that manage the development and evolution of families of product variants. They aim at handling the commonality and variability of these products. SPLs reduce the development cost, time-to-market, and increase overall quality of the product variants. But Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) can find the development of an SPL to be expensive and challenging, especially the process regarding the domain engineering. They can be forced to hire or train dedicated SPL-experts to work on the SPL development. This extra cost can be a significant obstacle toward the adoption of this technology by these enterprises. In this paper we present our work on an new approach to reduce and facilitate the adoption of the SPL techniques in SMEs. The goal of this approach is to automatically and incrementally build SPLs. This is based on an original combination of existing extractive and reactive approaches. We advocate the need for new solutions to facilitate the adoption of SPL technology by SMEs. We discuss a global solution based on an original combination of the existing extractive and reactive approaches. Our solution is a new approach that automatically and incrementally build SPLs. We present our global solution under the form of five research questions, of which we discuss the motivations and the methodologies. We also present early results of the first three questions, while the remaining two are the matter of future work.