A framework for role-based feature management in software product line organizations

Product line engineering requires changes in approaching software development. Two main processes are to be established: creating a reusable infrastructure, and utilizing it for developing products. In practice, these two processes cannot strictly be separated as product enhancements are requested frequently by customers and a changeable infrastructure is essential to react on market needs. Thus, various approaches, such as proactive, reactive, or agile, have been introduced to handle changes. At a finer level of granularity, however, changes comprise many activities with variable duration and thus result in sets of concurrent and overlapping software development activities. This paper, therefore, investigates changes in more detail and assumes that provisioning comprehensive information on changes and respective states are crucial to organizations for keeping a software product line manageable. As features are a common notion used in software engineering to reflect customer requirements, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for managing feature information and for defining role-specific views throughout all life cycle processes. Its concepts have been derived from an industrial context.