Using A Product Line Approach To Develop Course Projects
John Doherty, Gerald C. Gannod · 2020
Product Line and Product Family approaches are development techniques that take advantage of commonalities that exist among a set of current or planned products.The use of a product line approach allows for speedier integration of new requirements and capabilities to account for product variation without the timely process of reorganizing and reengineering an entire product.While the product line approach is an emerging paradigm in the software development research and industrial communities, little attention has been placed on its use as a methodology for developing and maintaining course projects in an engineering curriculum.As part of an Embedded Systems concentration at Arizona State University we are creating a course in Embedded Systems Engineering that focuses on systems integration and applications development.For this course we are developing a home automation product line.By using a product line approach, students can gain exposure to new technologies in successive offerings while still receiving instruction on core concepts.Furthermore, instructors can easily provide a wide variety of experiences for students with a minimal amount of incremental course refinements.