This paper describes a tutorial to introduce a product line engineering solution, including tools and methods, that is the subject of an upcoming ISO standard and known as "Feature-Based Systems and Software Product Line Engineering." Its usage is spreading beyond the traditional engineering realm, across the entire enterprise in areas such as product marketing, portfolio planning, manufacturing, supply chain management, product service and maintenance, and much more.

This paper describes a demonstration of the product line engineering tool and framework Gears from BigLever Software. Gears provides a single feature modeling language, a single variation point mechanism that works across the entire product lifecycle, and a single automated product configurator that are used to configure a product portfolio's shared engineering assets appropriately for each product in the portfolio. The result is an automated production line capability that can quickly produce any product in the portfolio from the same, single set of shared assets.

Early generation Software Product Line (SPL) engineering has evolved into Systems and Software Product Line Engineering (PLE) approaches that extend well beyond the original focus on source code, to a more holistic perspective of the engineering lifecycle. PLE tools and methods in commercial practice today support variation management in requirements, architecture, design models, source code, documentation, configuration data, test cases and more. One of the last lifecycle holdouts from PLE has been mechanical engineering, or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The engineering complexity of mechanical product families with embedded software has increased to a threshold where it is intractable for mechanical and software product line engineering to remain disjoint. This paper explores the convergence of mechanical, systems and software product line engineering and why it has been slow to emerge. The reasons are based both on conceptual misalignment among the traditionally distinct disciplines, as well the differences between the physics of mechanical and software systems. The Aras Innovator / BigLever Gears Bridge, an example PLM and PLE integration, is used to illustrate key concepts.

This paper describes a tutorial on an advanced set of product line engineering solutions, tools, and methods, which are being referred to as Second Generation Product Line Engineering (2GPLE).

This paper describes a tutorial on an advanced set of product line engineering solutions, tools, and methods, which are being referred to as Second Generation Product Line Engineering (2GPLE).

Many organizations that produce a portfolio of products for different customers need to ensure that sensitive or restricted content that may appear in some products must not appear in others. Examples of this need include complying with statutes in different countries of sale, protection of intellectual property developed specifically for one customer, and more. For organizations operating under these requirements and producing their products under a product line engineering paradigm that relies on automation in product derivation, there is a need for a method to ensure that the content restrictions have been met in the derived products. This paper describes an auditing method that meets this need. It was created for use in the Second Generation Product Line Engineering approach that is being applied by Lockheed Martin in their AEGIS ship combat system product line.

It is not unusual for commercial product line organizations to manufacture millions of product instances every year, in thousands of different "flavors". The scale and scope of diversity in product lines of this size can be high, creating significant challenges to engineers implementing the product line, product marketers defining the space of available products, and customers selecting from available products. Companies often organize their products into a product family tree to provide clarity about their product groupings and offerings, better enabling their customers to effectively navigate among the huge number of offerings and to efficiently converge on a suitable product instance. This paper describes a 2nd Generation Product Line Engineering (2GPLE) feature modeling structure called a multistage configuration tree that supports the engineering, deployment and maintenance of complex product family trees. Feature selections and downselections are incrementally staged throughout the nodes in a product family tree. Feature decisions made at any node are inherited by all descendants of that node, thereby defining a product family subtree.

This paper describes a tutorial on an advanced set of product line engineering solutions, tools, and methods, which are being referred to as Second Generation Product Line Engineering (2GPLE).

Live Training Transformation (LT2) is the product line strategy put in place by the United States Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI). The purpose of the LT2 product line is to provide a common set of core assets including architectures, software components, standards and processes that form the basis of all Army Live Training systems. As products consuming LT2 core assets evolve to meet the latest requirements of the military live training community, changes to the core product line architecture must also be made. Based on thorough analysis of the LT2 core capabilities and user trends toward web-enabled and mobile computing technologies, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy was identified and adopted as the objective architecture for the evolving LT2 product line. Future success of the LT2 product line now depends on the alignment of product line engineering concepts with the business and technical benefits of SOA, and to ensure that systematic reuse continues to provide substantial return-on-investment for the Army. This paper addresses the challenges of adopting SOA into an existing software product line, the unique circumstances of the LT2 SOA environment, and present a set of analysis and design considerations for the product line engineering community.

General Motors faces probably the most complex Systems and Software Product Line Engineering (PLE) challenges ever, in terms of product complexity, richness of variation, size of organization, and an unforgiving requirement to support over a dozen simultaneous development streams all geared towards each new model year. To meet this challenge, GM turned to an advanced set of explicitly defined product line engineering solutions, which have been referred to as Second Generation PLE (2GPLE). This includes reliance on features as the lingua franca to express product differences in all phases of the lifecycle, deeply nested hierarchical product lines, industrial strength automation to provide modeling consistency throughout, and more. This paper explains how 2GPLE is being applied at General Motors, and the technical and organizational lessons learned so far.

This paper describes a demonstration of the product line engineering tool and framework Gears from BigLever software. Gears provides a single feature modeling language, a single variation point mechanism, and a single automated product configurator that are used to configure a product portfolio's shared engineering assets appropriately for each product in the portfolio. The result is an automated production line capability that can quickly produce any product in the portfolio from the same, single set of shared assets.

Second Generation Systems and Software Product Line Engineering (2GPLE) has emerged to pick up where classic software product line practice leaves off, and is empowering a whole new class of product lines that solve unprecedented challenges of scale and variation complexity. These so-called "mega-scale" product lines often define product spaces with more possible variations than there are atoms in the universe.

For businesses to be competitive, today's product development organizations must deliver a product line a portfolio of similar products or systems with variations in features and functions rather than just an individual product. As a result, a new generation of innovative Systems and Software Product Line (SPL) engineering approaches has emerged to play an increasingly important role. This tutorial will spotlight how mainstream forces are driving SPL approaches to take a holistic perspective that is deeply integrated into the systems and software engineering lifecycle.

In this paper discusses that BigLever Software's Unified Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) Framework enables the integration of tools, assets and processes across the full system and software product line development lifecycle. The Gears framework offers a simple and elegant integrated software product line solution - for requirements engineers, architects, modelers, developers, build engineers, document writers, configuration managers, test engineers and project managers. The unified SPLE framework has enabled mainstream organizations with some of the largest, most sophisticated and complex, safety-critical systems ever built to adopt the SPLE approach.

For software product line engineering (SPLE) to become a standard and accepted practice in the industry, it must be widely embraced by large corporations, major software tool and service vendors, industry analysts, and technology press. We have seen steady but slow progress in all of these areas over the past few years. What can we do to better control or influence the future trends? Technology adoption at the industry scale is about building and sustaining momentum. Through a feedback loop comprising successes and failures, credible validation and invalidation, credible communication, leaps of faith, competitive opportunities, perceptions about perceptions, and so forth, momentum is gained or lost. Catalysts and inhibitors in the loop ultimately determine whether momentum will accelerate or be dampened. In this panel, we bring together an esteemed group of industry leaders from the key areas that impact momentum of new technology adoption, all of whom have been involved in the early stages of the industry's SPLE momentum. In this panel we will search for insights across a broad industry spectrum into the current catalysts and inhibitors, as well as opportunities for the Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) community to positively contribute to the momentum.

Summary form only given. The current generation of software product line (SPL) engineering success stories is being driven by a new generation of methods, tools and techniques. In this article, we explore the latest in the ongoing evolution of SPL best practices that make it easier to adopt an SPL engineering approach and that make it more efficient to achieve optimal benefits over the long term.The goal of the article is to enable attendees to gain a better and simpler understanding of SPL concepts and practice, based on the latest experiences and advances in the 3-tiered SPL methodology and the unified SPL lifecycle framework. These pragmatic SPL concepts represent current advances in SPL practice and are based on observations and firsthand experiences during deployments and operation of the latest generation of successful commercial SPL practices,including Lockheed Martin and HomeAway, as well as highly acclaimed Software Product Line Hall of Fame inductees Salion and LSI Logic/Engenio. The 3-Tiered SPL Methodology and Unified SPL Lifecycle Framework have supported full scale operational transitions to software product line practice, involving hundreds of software engineers, millions of lines of source code and requirements, and billions of dollars in commercial product lines.

The genesis of HomeAway, Inc. was startup by accretion - eight companies in the web-based vacation home rental market were acquired and merged. The technical solution during the merger and acquisition phase was to assimilate the software functionality of each of the eight companies into a one-size-fits-all application that could be configured with runtime settings to support the look-and-feel of the original eight. When rapid growth and an aggressive business plan pushed the one-size-fits-all approach beyond its limits, HomeAway decisively applied the 3-tiered software product line (SPL) methodology and the gears unified SPL Framework to transition to a software product line practice. This case study explores how HomeAway leveraged the 3-tiered methodology and gears to make their transition, accelerate software development, reduce defect density, lower development overhead, and extend the scalability of its portfolio to better achieve its aggressive business goals - all within 60 days.

Early generation software product line (SPL) methodologies tended to be large, complex, and offer many options and choices, making adoption in practice difficult to comprehend, justify and achieve. We have identified a simpler pattern for SPL methodology, referred to as the 3-Tiered Methodology, based on observations during deployments and operation of new generation SPL practices. This methodology is useful not only for the operation of full-scale SPL practice, but also in understanding, explaining and justifying SPLs, as well as for planning and making transitions to SPL practice.

Product Line Engineering (PLE) has become a major topic in industrial software development and many organizations have started to consider PLE as state-of-practice. In PLE we aim to exploit the commonalities and variabilities of a product line for a more efficient way of developing and maintaining the product-line members. Systematic exploitation usually results in a product line (PL) infrastructure containing variation points that support the family members’ variabilities.

A new generation of software product line success stories is being driven by a new generation of methods, tools and techniques. While early software product line case studies at the genesis of the field revealed some of the best software engineering improvement metrics seen in four decades, the latest generation of software product line success stories exhibit even greater improvements, extending benefits beyond product creation into maintenance and evolution, lowering the overall complexity of product line development, increasing the scalability of product line portfolios, and enabling organizations to make the transition to software product line practice with orders of magnitude less time, cost and effort. This paper describes some of the best methods from the industry's most recent software product line successes

A new generation of software product line success stories is being driven by a new generation of methods, tools and techniques. While early software product line case studies at the genesis of the field revealed some of the best software engineering improvement metrics seen in four decades, the latest generation of software product line success stories exhibit even greater improvements, extending benefits beyond product creation into maintenance and evolution, lowering the overall complexity of product line development, increasing the scalability of product line portfolios, and enabling organizations to make the transition to software product line practice with orders of magnitude less time, cost and effort. This tutorial explores some of the important new methods such as software mass customization sans application engineering, minimally invasive transitions, bounded product line combinatorics, and product line lifecycle management.

A hall of fame serves as a way to recognize distinguished members of a community in a field of endeavor. Those elected to membership in a hall of fame represent the highest achievement in their field, serving as models of what can be achieved and how. Each Software Product Line Conference culminates with a session in which members of the audience nominate systems for induction into the Software Product Line Hall of Fame. These nominations feed discussions about what constitutes excellence and success in product lines. The goal is to improve software product line practice by identifying the best examples in the field. Nominations are acted on by a panel of expert judges, who decide which nominees will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. You can read about the current members of the Software Product Line Hall of Fame at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/plp_hof.html. Inductees from 2005 will be announced at the SPLC 2006 Hall of Fame session.

A serious problem for programs that use persistent data is that information created and maintained by the program becomes invalid if the persistent types used in the program are modified in a new release. Unfortunately, there has been little systematic treatment of the problem; current approaches are manual, ad hoc, and time consuming both for programmers and users. In this article we present a new approach. Focusing on the special case of managing abstract syntax trees in structure-oriented environments, we show how automatic transformers can be generated in terms of an implementor's changes to the grammar of these environments.