Software Product Line Engineering Basics - Model-Driven and Software Product Line Engineering - page 34

D EFINITION 2.2.- The product line scope is the set of products
that is built by the product line. It defines the business domain,
which is the focus of the product line.
There is no standard way to define this set; an enumeration
complemented with informal textual descriptions can be used.
The variability management tries to give a more formal
description using, for example, feature models and product
configurations.
D EFINITION 2.3.- The core assets are the set of re-usable artifacts
that are built and maintained along the product line activities.
These assets are the building blocks for the products of the
product line.
The notion of asset or artifact is neutral and can be
anything needed in the product line development. That means
the usual elements used in software engineering such as
requirements, UML, programs in any language, configuration
scripts, architectures, documentations, or tests. It can also
include performance models, budget estimations, marketing
requirements, and so on.
D EFINITION 2.4.- The production plan is a guide to build
the products from the product configuration by re-using and
configuring the assets.
The production plan collects a set of rules to build
the products from the configuration, thus, managing the
commonality, the variability, and re-using of the assets. The
production plan usually defines a reference architecture,which
is a way to map all the products to build in a common
framework. In the new approach of SPLE based on MDE, this
production plan materializes by a chain of transformations.
This is then more formal and also paves the way for automatic
product derivation.
D EFINITION 2.5.- The reference architecture is a specification
capturing some global properties of the functions, qualities,