Workshop on "Product Line Engineering - The early steps: Planning, Managing and Modeling"

Dieser Workshop findet in englischer Sprache während der Net.ObjectDays 2001 statt.

Programm

Das Programm des Workshops ist in einen der beiden Workshop-Tracks "WS" integriert.

Eine genaue Aufstellung der Vorträge des Workshops finden Sie hier.

Diese Vorträge sind in der Programmübersicht mit dem folgenden Ikon gekennzeichnet:
(Tooltip beachten).

Weitergehende Informationen (engl.):

Organizers:

Klaus Schmid Fraunhofer
IESE Kaiserslautern, Germany
schmid@iese.fhg.de

and

Birgit Geppert
Avaya Labs - Software Technology Research
Murray Hill, NJ, USA
bgeppert@avaya.com

Content:

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.

Additional material:

More information is avalailable in the following document (ASCII text) here.