20 years of industrial experience at SPLC
Maider Azanza, Leticia Montalvillo, Óscar Díaz · 2021
Software Product Lines (SPLs) have been around since the late 1970s and have established themselves as a way to deal with product variability. Tens of companies around the globe can pay testament to their advantages. Practitioners, however, have lamented the lack of data on other practitioners' experiences that would help them in the SPL journey. This work intends to analyze the application of SPLs in industry in the last 20 years. We departed from 194 industrial studies that were published at the Software Product Line Conference, the premier venue for SPL research. After the filtering process we selected 66 primary studies, from 43 different companies and 15 countries. The studies were classified to answer three research questions: (i) which contexts have SPLs been applied in?, (ii) what phenomena have been reported? and, (iii) what evidences have been collected in terms of obtained benefits, encountered issues and lessons learned? Regarding the context, SPLs have mainly been reported in USA and Germany (50%) and are used to develop embedded systems (76%). The most cited reason to adopt SPLs is the need to increase product variants (42.42%). As for the phenomena, the most reported problem area is adoption (39.39%). Last, as for evidences the most cited benefit is a cost reduction (53.03%), the issue is evolution (13.13%) and the learned lesson is that architecture is essential (24.24%). We believe the findings will be of interest to the community as a whole in quest to bridge the gap between industry and academia while balancing rigor, authenticity and relevance.