Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 99

mechanisms to re-use composition techniques from SPLE
in the approach, and we merge them with model-driven
mechanisms and techniques to capitalize on product line
development.
4.1. Introduction
To date, the software engineering industry keeps looking to
increase the productivity and quality of software engineering
processes, reducing costs, and time-to-market. This is a
perpetual challenge; researchers and engineers are focusing
on several attempts to improve software engineering practices.
However, the industry is struggling to adopt model-driven
engineering as well as software product line engineering
concepts, techniques, and tools on a large scale as a means to
alleviate such needs.
MDE-based SPLs are product lines based on MDE
principles. Several approaches that use MDE to create SPLs
have emerged. (See Chapter 8 for more details) There is
still no standard way to integrate MDE and SPLE, either
from a practical or an academic perspective. However, all the
current approaches agree that to be successful, model-driven
and software product line engineering involves the definition
of suitable mechanisms to re-use promised modularization
and composition techniques from SPLE. It also involves
aligning the academic and practical efforts toward model-
driven mechanisms that facilitate the development of software
products.
A fundamental objective of introducing MDE in SPL is
the expectation of automating the production plan. The ideal
situation is to configure products from the set of features or
requirements they must include and then to push a button
to build the product. However, this ideal situation is far from
the state-of-the-art in MDE and SPLE. To fully generate
code from models, we need the complete behavior, and it is