Workshop Product Line Engineering – The early steps: Planning, Managing, and Modeling Content Description Product Line (PL) Engineering has become a major topic in industrial software engineering. It focuses on the development of complete system families as opposed to single systems. PL engineering aims at efficient and cost-effective development through large-scale reuse by exploiting the family members' commonalities and by controlling their variabilities. The technical foundation for family-based development techniques has been studied for quite some time now. The focus until now has been on the down-stream, implementation-related activities such as architecting or flexible implementation technologies. However, in order to be successful these implementation activities need to be performed in an organizational and technical framework that is appropriately prepared to support them. This raises organizational issues, issues of PL planning, problems technology transfer and system migration, as well as issues concerning requirements modeling and management in the context of product lines. These more up-stream activities have not yet seen as much attention in product line research. Finding appropriate answers to these concerns seems to be particularly relevant from the perspective of product line introduction. In this workshop we focus on these early steps in PL engineering in particular. During a transition to product line development, the early steps of product line engineering require changes in the target organization. These changes may also be the most profound in the whole transition, which makes them prime issues in the context of technology transfer. The questions that we chose as main topics of the workshop reflect what we regard as focus issues during technology transfer. This , in particular, pertains to organizational questions, like how to adapt an organization to a product line style organization, what are characteristics of organizations that are well adapted to product lines, or how can this organizational transition be adequately supported. An organization switching to product line engineering also faces questions related to the integrated planning of a complete product line, which has ramifications on how to scope reuse activities. As reuse also changes the product line's economics, this in turn influences the viability of products. Evaluating reuse from an economic point of view is a completely new activity for an organization that previously performed stovepipe development. This is also strongly related to the need of to increase benefits and control risks of product line engineering. The identification of requirements across the various products is important for a successful identification of reuse potential. These requirements must be modeled in a way that allows for the identification and analysis of inherent inconsistencies between requirements for different systems. In addition to the basic question of how to introduce PL-related technology into a target organization, we want to address the question of how to perform this incrementally: what kind of technology is introduced first, which one later; what part of the systems or which organizational unit to focus on first, what can or should be done later. Organizational Concept Dissemination of Workshop Information Information about the workshop will disseminated mainly using the following mechanisms: - Mailing lists (e.g., SEWorld) - Flyers (mailed as well as presented at other conferences / workshops) - Web-page The preliminary program committee consists of the following members: - Mark Ardis - Jan Bosch - Paul Clements - Ulrich Eisenecker - John Favaro - Cristina Gacek - Birgit Geppert - Peter Knauber - Henk Obbink - Dave Parnas - Klaus Pohl - Klaus Schmid - Juha-Pekka Tolvanen Additional members may be added. (Some feedback still open at this point.) Workshop Day The workshop is planned as a one-day event. During the first part (about three quarters of the time) the various submissions will be presented and discussed. (We plan to restrict the number of accepted papers to about 12.) The presentations will be given in three sessions. Each session consists of about four papers that are related in terms of content. After each presentation (about 10 minutes) a short discussion (about 5 minutes) will happen and at the end of the whole session an integrative discussion of the different papers will be performed (20-30 minutes). Together with a short introductory statement by the organizers, each session will be about 1 hour 30 minutes long. During the second part (remainder of the time), break-out groups will be formed for discussing current topics that are relevant to the focus of the workshop. The workshop participants will determine the ultimate selection of the discussion topics. Each of these discussion groups (max 3; limited by availability of rooms) will have about one hour and 30 minutes time for discussion. Afterward a short plenum presentation of the results will be performed followed a plenum discussion. Preliminary timetable: 09:00-09:15 Welcome and Short Introduction 09:15-10:45 Session 1 – Four papers Break 11:00-12:30 Session 2 – Four papers Lunch break 13:30-14:45 Session 3 – Four papers Break 15:00-16:30 Working-Groups 16:30-16:45 Presentation of Discussions 16:45-17:00 Final plenum discussion Preliminary Call for Papers Product Line Engineering – The early steps: Planning, Managing, and Modeling Scope of the Workshop: Product Line (PL) Engineering has become a major topic in industrial software engineering. It focuses on the development of complete system families as opposed to single systems. PL engineering aims at efficient and cost-effective development through large-scale reuse by exploiting the family members' commonalities and by controlling their variabilities. The technical foundation for family-based development techniques has been studied for quite some time now. The focus until now has been on the down-stream, implementation-related activities such as architecting or flexible implementation technologies. However, in order to be successful these implementation activities need to be performed in an organizational and technical framework that is appropriately prepared to support them. This raises organizational issues, issues of PL planning, as well as issues concerning requirements modeling and management in the context of product lines. These more up-stream activities have not yet seen as much attention. In this workshop we focus on these early steps in PL engineering in particular. The workshop is organized by: Klaus Schmid Fraunhofer IESE Kaiserslautern, Germany schmid@iese.fhg.de Birgit Geppert Avaya Labs - Software Technology Research Murray Hill, NJ, USA bgeppert@avaya.com Objective of the Workshop: The goal of this workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers from the field to foster a strong exchange of ideas and experiences. In particular we plan on tackling the following issues: - How must an organization be structured to support product line engineering? How does this differ from conventional organizations? - How can product line development be integrated in a running organization that previously performed stovepipe development? How do we motivate people? How do we select functionality areas to start with migrating to PL development? - How do we plan for product line development, i.e., how do we manage the multi-project (and thus multi-customer) coordination problems? - How can we introduce a product line incrementally? What ordering of steps should be respected? What are dependencies among technologies? How to determine the best starting point in terms of functionality or organizational unit? - How can planning for product lines be integrated into a company's portfolio planning process? - How do we manage the refinement of a family into subfamilies? - How can we model the product line requirements in a way that also supports their efficient instantiation? - How can we cope with the various needs to adapting and evolving product lines like changing customer requirements (from individual customers or market needs) or environment changes (technological progress, legal constraints). - How do we scope product line development in order to maximize its pay-off? - How do we identify the assets that, if developed in a reusable manner, support the organizational goals the best? - How do we identify and address product line specific risks (i.e., risks that are typical for reuse and other long-term projects)? - How do we support the efficient elicitation of product line information? - How do we integrate PL engineering with other up-to-date software engineering trends, such as UML or extreme programming? In particular, we encourage submissions reporting on industrial experiences related to these issues. Submissions: To participate, authors should send papers relevant to one or more of the topics mentioned in the Objective section. Submissions will be evaluated according to the relevance and originality of the work and to their ability to generate discussion between the participants of the workshop. Papers should be no longer than four pages (single-column, 11pt) and submitted as PDF-file. Program Committee - Mark Ardis - Jan Bosch - Paul Clements - Ulrich Eisenecker - John Favaro - Cristina Gacek - Birgit Geppert - Peter Knauber - Henk Obbink - Dave Parnas - Klaus Pohl - Klaus Schmid - Juha-Pekka Tolvanen