The tutorial provides practical guidance for project managers and architects facing the "PLE challenge". It demonstrates practices and concrete activities we use to make a product line an economical and technical success.

Managing and developing a set of software products jointly using a software product line approach has achieved significant productivity and quality gain in the last decade. More and more, product lines now are becoming themselves entities that are sold and bought in the software supply chain. Customers build more specialized product lines on top of them or derive themselves the concrete products. As customers have different requirements, whole product lines now may vary depending on customer needs—they need to be customized. Current approaches going beyond the scope of one product line do not provide appropriate means for customization. They either are tailored to specific implementation techniques, only regard customization on few levels (e.g., only source code level), or imply a lot of manual effort for performing the customization.

Domain analysis involves not only looking at standard requirements documents (e.g., use case specifications) but also at customer information packs, market analyses, etc. Looking across all these documents and deriving, in a practical and scalable way, a feature model that is comprised of coherent abstractions is a fundamental and non-trivial challenge. We conduct an exploratory study to investigate the suitability of Information Retrieval (IR) techniques for scalable identification of commonalities and variabilities in requirement specifications for software product lines. Accordingly, based on observations derived from industrial experience and on state-of-the-art research and practice, we also propose an initial framework, leveraging IR to systematically abstract requirements from existing specifications of a given domain into a feature model. We evaluate this framework, present a roadmap for its further extension, and formulate hypotheses to guide future work in exploring IR techniques for domain analysis.

Early aspects deal with crosscutting concerns in requirements analysis, domain analysis and architecture design [1]. Work on early aspects focuses on systematically identifying, modularizing, and analyzing such crosscutting concerns and their impact at the early phases of the software development life cycle.

This demonstration presents an approach that facilitates variability implementation, management, and tracing from architectural modeling to implementation. A tool suite is provided that integrates aspect-oriented and model-driven software development into product line engineering.

This paper explains the challenges we experienced when introducing a software product family approach in Siemens business groups. Our vision is a complete and easily accessible cookbook with advice on how to start such an approach. In a first attempt, we identified a collection of more or less successful best practices. On the suggestions and the open questions we are going to present in this paper, we search validation by practitioners in the field

A developer attempting to evolve a system in which design patterns have been applied can benefit from knowing which code implements which design pattern. For instance, the developer may be able to understand the purpose, or to assess the flexibility of the code, more quickly. The degree to which the developer benefits depends upon their understanding of the pattern. Achieving an in-depth understanding of even a simple pattern can be difficult as pattern descriptions span several pages of text, and discuss interrelated design concepts and choices. To enable a developer to effectively trace the design goals associated with a pattern to and from source, we have developed the Design Pattern Rationale Graph (DPRG) approach and associated tool. A DPRG makes explicit the relationships between design concepts in a design pattern, provides a graphical representation of the design pattern text, and supports the linking of those concepts to implementing code. In this paper, we introduce the DPRG approach and tool, and present case studies to show that a DPRG can, at low-cost, help a developer identify design goals in a pattern, and can improve a developer's confidence about how those goals are realized in a code base.