BIGLEVER NEWSLETTER: Perspectives

The Trajectory of SPL Engineering in 2008

Greetings from BigLever:

In 2007, we saw software product lines truly enter into the consciousness of mainstream software development. This was widely evident in the heightened level of attention from editors and tech magazines, industry analysts, university courses, developer conferences, software tool vendors and awards, and – most importantly – product development organizations across a broad spectrum of the industry.

A new set of forces emerged from the demands of widespread mainstream adoption, which in turn have set the trajectory for the advancement of the software product line (SPL) engineering field in 2008.

• System and software product line engineering. SPLs are often engineered within the larger context of a hardware/software system. Embedded software is the obvious example, though other common examples include enterprise and web-based software that is designed in the specific context of server, network and specialty hardware. The common theme I observed in 2007 was the importance of supporting the combined system and software perspective for requirements, architectures, models, documentation, test plans and so forth -- rather than just a narrow software-only product line perspective.
  
• Unified product line engineering lifecycle. Product development organizations typically have full development lifecycle processes, tools and assets in place. Another common theme I observed last year was that adopting an SPL approach should not mean abandoning or fragmenting the existing lifecycle infrastructure, but rather transitioning to a first-class product line engineering infrastructure that is applied harmoniously across all stages of the lifecycle.
  

Ultimately, these mainstream forces are driving SPLs to take a more holistic approach that is deeply integrated into the system and software engineering lifecycle, as well as the business side of the enterprise. These forces illustrate that SPL challenges will not be solved at any one stage in the product engineering lifecycle, nor will they be solved in independent and disparate silos in each of the different stages of the lifecycle.

The Unified SPL Framework

At BigLever, we are leading the industry response to these forces with a Unified SPL Framework. The motivation for this technology framework is to ease the integration of tools, assets and processes across the full system and software development lifecycle.

The goal is to provide product line engineers with a common set of SPL concepts and constructs for all of their tools and assets, at every stage of the lifecycle. Furthermore, the goal is to apply these concepts and constructs uniformly, so that product line development processes flow cleanly from one stage to another in the lifecycle – for requirements engineers, architects, modelers, developers, build engineers, document writers, configuration managers, test engineers and project managers.

The unified SPL framework offers product line engineering organizations the following advantages:

• A single feature model that can uniformly express product line diversity for all assets in all stages of the system and software development lifecycle, including requirements, architecture, models, design, source code, test cases and documentation.
  
• A single variation point mechanism that can be uniformly applied to all tools and their associated assets in all stages of the system and software development lifecycle, including tools for requirements management, model-driven development, source code development, test case development, configuration management, build management, change management and document development.
  
• A single, automated product configurator that uniformly assembles and configures assets from each stage of the development lifecycle to automatically produce all of the products in a product line, with the push of a single button.
  

In early 2008, we are seeing the early successes of tool vendors and product line engineering organizations taking advantage of the Unified SPL Framework to create end-to-end system and software lifecycle solutions for product line engineering. I look forward to sharing more about the framework and its successes throughout the year.

Best Regards,

Charles W. Krueger
BigLever Software CEO
SoftwareProductLines.com Moderator
ckrueger@biglever.com

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