Introduction - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 2

flow of software artifacts. Traceability is also a crucial issue in
product line engineering. MDE can help in managing artifacts
and tracing links.
The main focus of this topic is to propose a practical
approachtoengineeringasoftwareproductlinebasedonMDE.
This topic presents the basic concepts of both engineering
approaches and the main challenges in defining a model-
driven tool. The topic is concerned with the technical aspects
of modeling variability, defining a reference architecture, and
constructing tool support. This topic can be useful for graduate
students as well as software engineers who wish to learn about
product lines and concepts of model-driven engineering. Two
application examples illustrate the concepts and the processes:
a product line of Smart-Homes and a product line of Collection
Managers. It is also appropriate for researchers in the area of
MDE and SPLE since it addresses some complex issues such
as fine-grained configuration and fine-grained variation.
1.1. Software product line engineering
Software engineering aims at speeding up software
development and maintenance processes, decreasing costs,
and improving productivity and quality. By addressing these
objectives, software product line engineering seeks to develop
software products through the re-use of artifacts. Thus, the
products should be quickly developed, and their quality
should be as good as the quality of the artifacts used for
their construction. A software product line (SPL) is defined
as a set of similar products created from re-usable artifacts
in the context of a specific application domain. In SPLE,
product designers configure and derive products by re-using
the available artifacts created by the product line architects.
The description of the set of products that are part of an SPL
is called the scope of the product line. To capture and express
the scope of SPLs, product line architects first determine the
commonalities,i.e. the characteristics shared by all products in