Software product line Examples

What is Software product line?

A software product line is a collection of multiple software. Software engineers can share different assets among all the software available in the respective product line. We can share the common, managed set of software features that can satisfy the specific needs of a big task. These common features are developed from a common set of core assets.  Some of the core assets are mentioned here;

Software product line SPL
Figure: Software product line SPL

Software asset inputs

As we are talking about share assets. So, it is important to know “what are software assets?”.

There are multiple software assets. Some of these software assets are mentioned here.

Software Asset Management is the business strategy for reclaiming the budget and to increase the savings by performing different actions. e.g, controlling the procurement and automating the mechanism of procurement. Further management of usage and deployment of software licenses are also considered in Software Asset Management.

Some of the software assets may be optional and some of the assets may have internal variation and due to this variation can be configured in a different way to provide different behavior.

Decision model

Each product in the software product line is uniquely defined by its product for each of the variable and optional features in the decision model. The decision model describes optional and variable features for the products in the product line.

Production mechanism and process

The means for composing and configuring products from the software asset inputs. Product decisions are used during production to determine which software asset inputs to use and how to configure the variation points within those assets.

Software product outputs

Software product outputs are the collection of all software products that can be produced for the product line. Now the question is that “How we can define the scope of the product line?”. The scope can be easily determined by exploring the set of software product outputs that can be produced by using the production mechanism from the software assets and decision model.

The software product line consists of the same category of software systems that have some variable and some common functionality. Now, the question is how we can understand the common and variable functionality. A better understanding of the product line can be obtained by considering the different perspectives. Some of these perspectives are dynamic modeling, requirements modeling, and static modeling.

The fundamental principle of the Software Product Line is to manage the variability. This management involves the separation of the product
the line into the following three parts;

  • Parts common to some but not all products
  • Individual products with their own specific requirements
  • Common components
  • Management of the parts throughout the development.

The important course content of the Software Product Line

Here is mentioned, some important topics for a course of Software Product Line.

  1. Knowing the problems with large-scale software reuse
  2. Knowing the problems with large-scale software customization
  3. Knowing the  SEIs framework for Software Product Line Practice
  4. Knowing the scoping and domain analysis
  5. Knowing the design of software product-line architectures
  6. Knowing the development of software product-line components
  7. Knowing the assessment of a company’s potential for working with a software product line
  8. Knowing the  verification and validation in software product line architectures, the evolution of software product-line assets