Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Software product line engineering

Software product line engineering is apparently about modelling variants and achieving formalism in feature descriptions. This is the conclusion I make after attending some workshops and the first morning sessions at the 14th International Software Product Line Conference in Jeju, Korea.
I presented an interesting  paper together with HÃ¥kan from Scania of how architects work with maintaining and updating existing architectures over time in the automotive industry. And we did not get a single question!
Last year when I presented another case study everybody was interested in the case and wanted to hear more from industry, but this time it didn't seem to interest the audience.
I find it quite difficult to find venues to present research based on industrial experience and not theoretical examples.

Besides that, I find the notion of feature used in many presentations different from what I am used to. To me a feature is something which is discernible for the end user, same as the definition found in the original work here. For example an adaptive cruise control is a marketable feature in a vehicle. But if I would model that similar to feature modelling prevailing here the model would consist of an optional radar, a compulsory engine, compulsory brake, etc.This means a much higher degree of knowledge about the realisation of features.

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