Teaching software product lines as a paradigm to engineers: an experience report in education programs and seminars for senior engineers in Japan

The paper reports authors' experience in teaching software product lines (SPL) for senior engineers in the company. An effective way for education in the experience is to teach SPL as a paradigm consisting of some key ideas and show how we can introduce the paradigm into the development process. The authors have used PLUS as a reference of such development process. Feature modeling is taught not only as a means of variability modeling but also as a means to facilitate construction of abstraction hierarchy and separation of concerns. Giving anti-patterns of feature modeling and countermeasures to them helps engineers discuss construction of better feature models.