Software Product Line Engineering Basics - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 17

artifacts facilitates the composition of products from a set
of artifacts already developed and tested, instead of building
the products from scratch. Software product line engineering
is a paradigm that provides a means to incorporate the
re-use strategy as a central part of software development
[CLE 01, BOS 02]. A software product line (SPL) is a set of
software products that share many common properties to be
built from a common set of assets [CZA 00]. The ultimate
objective of product line engineering is to improve productivity,
i.e.savetime,reducecosts,andincreasethequalityofproducts.
In this chapter, we first introduce the basis of SPL engineering
(SPLE),includingthemainprocessesinvolvedinthecreationof
SPLs: domain engineering process , section 2.5, and application
engineering process , section 2.7. These two processes are also
often called “development for re-use” and “development with
re-use”, placing strong emphasis on re-usability.
The principle of SPLE is to develop several products sharing
some common concerns in a development cycle.
D EFINITION 2.1.- A software product line is a set of software
applications that shares concerns, features, requirements, or
market specificity and that are built in a rational and planned
way from a set of re-usable assets.
Mainly used in Europe, the term product family can be
considered as a synonym.The term software factory is a related
and older concept, but it is not equivalent and covers various
meanings. It was used earlier to denote product lines and
it is still used, specifically in the Microsoft context. Often, a
software factory denotes a new generation framework trying to
automatetheapplicationengineeringasmuchaspossible.This
concept emerges from model-driven engineering and some new
generative approaches making the definition of complex and
automatedtoolchainspossible.Asoftwarefactorycanbeapart
of an SPL, namely in the latest generation where application
engineering is strongly automated. However, product line is