Günter Böckle, Siemens, München, Germany
Peter Knauber, Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Frank van der Linden, Philips, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Linda Northrop, SEI, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Klaus Pohl, University of Essen, Germany
Briefly, product family development focuses on the creation and maintenance of a whole set (family) of software products. Family development distinguishes between development for reuse (called domain engineering) dealing with planning, creation, and maintenance of system assets (development artefacts) common to the various application systems and development with reuse (called application engineering) where the parts that are specific to particular applications are handled. Whereas the principle software engineering concepts and solutions developed for traditional “one of a kind” systems are also applicable to product family development, these concepts need to be adjusted and enhanced, especially in the areas of requirements engineering, software architecture, and component-based development.
Product families promise several benefits as result of their underlying concept: systematic and strategically planned reuse. The reuse of assets in more than one application saves development and maintenance effort (because common parts have to be handled only once), decreases time-to-market (because applications are derived from existing platforms), and increases product quality (due to the reuse of tested and proven assets). As more and more examples of successful product family development are reported in literature, they are gaining increasing interest in various application domains including electronic commerce, information systems, medical systems, and telecommunication systems.
Currently, two major efforts on product family research can be identified worldwide: in the U.S., there is the product line practice initiative by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University. In Europe, product families are addressed by a large consortium of leading companies and research institutions in the CAFÉ project (From Concept to Application in System-Family Engineering, project ip00004 in the ITEA initiative of EUREKA å!2023 program). Whereas in the past most effort was focused on technical issues, the organizational and management aspects of product families, for example, smooth family adoption strategies, become more and more important.
The proposed workshop will build on the results of the very successful Dagstuhl Seminar on Product Family Development held in April 2001 (Seminar No. 01161), which among others has led to an IEEE Software Special Issue on Product Families (scheduled for late 2002). Whereas the 2001 Seminar has focused on technical aspects of product families, the main focus of the proposed seminar will be on management and organisational aspects of product families.