Software Product Line Engineering Basics - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 32

the re-factoring of assets during the product line evolution
is complex. Evolution in software engineering is an intricate
problem and it is increasing with SPLE. The latest method
is called extractive : It starts with a family of existing products,
which will be transformed in a product line.Thus,the company
has a good knowledge of the domain and the applications to
build. This is an interesting way for companies having some
application domains and wanting to quickly adopt SPLE. In
this topic, we will focus on proactive product lines; however,
most of the techniques used apply to the other approaches.
Another process characterization was illustrated
in [RAS 11]; it is related to the kind of products the company
has to build with regard to its business model. In the product-
oriented approach the products are well identified and are
expected to be sold a number of times. The number of different
products is stable and they are mastered by the company.
However, new features can be added to some products in
the line, thus, facilitating product line evolution. Multimedia
systems or mobile phone applications are examples for which
we can expect to automate the product generation as much
as possible. Hence, the focus is on maintenance and evolution
of the product lines to get benefits. The solution-oriented is
quite adequate to manage a set of products for which the
variability analysis is difficult; for instance, if the products are
too numerous. It is the case that if products are sold only once;
each product is different from the previous one, but they share
some commonalities. It is rather difficult to automate the
product derivation, but it is convenient to use SPLE to get a
more rational process than a simple copy-and-paste paradigm.
For instance, web applications for enterprises are often very
similar but different in many details about their content,
interactions, and presentations. In this approach, the degree
of automation provided by the software factory is considered
more crucial than scoping the domain. These orientations
and ways are not completely orthogonal. For instance, the
solution-oriented approach can be viewed as the initial step