research-article

Variability management in small development organizations: experiences and lessons learned from a case study

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Dirk HeinAuthors Info & Claims

SPLC '09: Proceedings of the 13th International Software Product Line Conference

Pages 285 - 294

Published: 24 August 2009 Publication History

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Abstract

Product line practices promise to reduce development and maintenance efforts, to improve the productivity and to reduce the time to market by systematic reuse of commonalities and variabilities. However, in order to reap the fruits of exploiting those, an upfront investment is required. This paper presents a case study, which analyzes the cost-benefit ratio for one product line discipline -- variability management. Wikon GmbH -- a small German development organization evolving a product line of remote monitoring and controlling devices -- switched from manual, file-based conditional compilation to tool-supported decision models. We discuss experiences made and show that the break-even was reached with the 4^th product derivation.

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Cited By

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John ISilva AHeymans PCzarnecki KEisenecker U(2011)Evaluating variability instantiation strategies for product linesProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software-Intensive Systems10.1145/1944892.1944905(105-113)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1944892.1944905
Kenner AKästner CHaase SLeich T(2010)TypeChefProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development10.1145/1868688.1868693(25-32)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1868688.1868693

Index Terms

Variability management in small development organizations: experiences and lessons learned from a case study
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development process management

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SPLC '09: Proceedings of the 13th International Software Product Line Conference

August 2009

319 pages

Conference Chair:
Dirk Muthig
Lufthansa Systems Passenger Services GmbH, Germany
,
Program Chair:
John D. McGregor
Clemson University

Publisher

Carnegie Mellon University

United States

Publication History

Published: 24 August 2009

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Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung

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SPLC '09

SPLC '09: 13th International Software Product Line Conference

August 24 - 28, 2009

California, San Francisco, USA

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SPLC '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 82 submissions, 37%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

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John ISilva AHeymans PCzarnecki KEisenecker U(2011)Evaluating variability instantiation strategies for product linesProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software-Intensive Systems10.1145/1944892.1944905(105-113)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1944892.1944905
Kenner AKästner CHaase SLeich T(2010)TypeChefProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development10.1145/1868688.1868693(25-32)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1868688.1868693

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Recommendations

Variability Change Management Using the Orthogonal Variability Model-Based Traceability

VML* – a family of languages for variability management in software product lines

Variability Management in Dynamic Software Product Lines: A Systematic Mapping