Flexible product line engineering with a virtual platform
Michał Antkiewicz, Wenbin Ji, Thorsten Berger, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Thomas Schmorleiz, Ralf Lämmel, Ștefan Stănciulescu, Andrzej Wąsowski, Ina Schaefer · 2014
Cloning is widely used for creating new product variants. While it has low adoption costs, it often leads to maintenance problems. Long term reliance on cloning is discouraged in favor of systematic reuse offered by product line engineering (PLE) with a central platform integrating all reusable assets. Unfortunately, adopting an integrated platform requires a risky and costly migration. However, industrial experience shows that some benefits of an integrated platform can be achieved by properly managing a set of cloned variants.