Past, present and future of product line engineering in industry
Juha Erik Savolainen · 2014
Product line engineering has evolved from being a practice invented by individual companies out of the urgent need to find ways to manage a set of products, into a science commonly practiced by a large number of companies. In this talk, we look back how companies used to manage variability and how that has evolved over time. We also explore the reasons why variability is needed and discuss if the needs to manage variability will change in the future. We investigate the difference of managing variability in functional and quality requirements and explain the commercial rationale behind the choices of variability management. In summary, we try to answer the following questions concerning the past, present, and future of product line engineering: What has worked and what has not? Why deploying research innovations often fail in practice? What are the characteristics of the real product lines that are often ignored by the research community? What is future direction of product line engineering in industry? That is, do we still need variability management in the future?