Software Product Line Engineering Basics - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 19

application using the core assets but also suggesting new
assets if needed. These three processes are orchestrated by the
management process but they are all strongly interacting.
Figure 2.1. The three processes view
Here, we concentrate on technical engineering activities
rather than on project management. Effective technical
engineering is presented in two phases: domain engineering
and application engineering . The first engineering step
analyzes the domain, the commonalities, and the variability. It
elaborates a global and common production plan and generates
the assets to be re-used. The second engineering step is
responsible for building one product from its characteristics,
the core assets, and the plan defined during the first step.
The plan can be an informal document describing how to
build the products. The future trend in SPLE is to automate
the production plan, and one successful technique is to use
MDE to define an executable tool chain. These steps will be
described in more detail in the rest of the topic. Another
point to bear in mind is the difference between the problem
space and the solution space traditionally used in software
engineering. The problem space is the set of requirements,
the need for some applications, regardless of the precise
structure and shape of this information. Its goal is to describe
the functionality of the system, but often non-functional
requirements are also added, such as performance or even