Exemplar driven development of software product lines

The benefits of following a product line approach to develop similar software systems are well documented. Nevertheless, some case studies have revealed significant barriers to adopt such approach. In order to minimize the paradigm shift between conventional software engineering and software product line engineering, this paper presents a new development process where the products of a domain are made by analogy to an existing product. Furthermore, this paper discusses the capabilities and limitations of different techniques to implement the analogy relation and proposes a new language to overcome such limitations.

► The benefits of following a product line approach to develop similar software systems are well documented. Nevertheless, some case studies have revealed significant barriers to adopt such approach.
► To minimize the paradigm shift between conventional software engineering and software product line engineering, this paper presents a new development process where the products of a domain are made by analogy to an existing product.
► The paper describes how to implement analogy relations to automatically derive all the domain products from existing exemplars by using techniques widespread applied to generalize code.
► The limitations of such techniques are discussed. As a result, a new language is proposed to overcome those limitations.