Use of SPLE to deliver custom solutions at product cost: challenges and a way forward

Need for adaptiveness of business applications is on the rise with continued increase in business dynamics. Ground-up development techniques neither deliver nor can scale in this dynamic situation. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) aims to increase adaptiveness by capturing commonality and variability up front to suitably configure the application from its parts. Code-centric SPLE techniques show unacceptable responsiveness when business applications are subjected to changes along multiple simultaneously evolving dimensions. Using clear separation of functional concerns from implementation platform, model driven approaches enable easy delivery of the same functionality into multiple technology platforms. However, business applications exhibit variability in several dimensions such as functionality, business process, design decisions, architecture, and technology platform. We argue that SPLE techniques need to be elevated to a higher level of abstraction to enable them to work in unison with model-driven techniques in order to realize the desired adaptiveness along all these dimensions. We have been delivering large business applications using model-driven techniques for past 15 years. In this paper, we have outlined several key challenges that we faced in adopting SPLE and presented tenets of a solution that is likely to have greater acceptance by industry practice.