The University of Alabama Department of Computer Science Colloquium Series Speaker
John D. McGregor · 2006
The software product line approach to the development of software-intensive products is a strategy that has allowed many companies to achieve aggressive business goals. The strategy blends business and technical practices so that even low level decisions can be evaluated in terms of the impact on the business goals of the product line organization. The product line organization manages the variation among the set of products to the benefit of the organization. Careful attention to variation allows organizations to achieve strategically significant levels of reuse; levels of 75 to 85% are not unusual. Variations are initially identified during a thorough domain analysis, used in determining the final product set through economic modeling, and implemented using a variety of implementation techniques. This talk will touch on business issues such as economic modeling and technical issues such as feature modeling, and automatic code generation. This seemingly diverse set of topics shares a common thread – the satisfaction of specific business goals through variability management. The software product line strategy is sufficiently mature to have industrial success stories but is sufficient ly immature to be a rich source of research problems. This talk will introduce you to the software product line strategy and relate the strategy to a variety of research areas.