Software Product Lines in Value Based Software Engineering

Objective: Evaluate the value of a product line in terms of maintainability, extensibility and configurability with refer to the interested stakeholders: customers, maintainers, producers. Rationale: There are values that customers constantly require in a modern software application. Some of these values are supported by product lines. Nevertheless, in the industrial and scientific communities the conjecture that customer values clash with those of producers/maintainers is diffused. Design of Study: we have designed and carried out a case study in an industrial context on an ongoing project to verify the validity of a product line in creating value for stakeholders. So data was collected as the project was being executed along a nine month period. Following, descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing were carried out. Results: we have shown how a misunderstanding between the two concepts of product lines and program families may lead to incorrect conclusions. For this reason we have tried to better characterize the two concepts. This improvement led to a product line able to mitigate the clashes feared by researchers and practitioners. Conclusions: This study has represented a first step towards analyzing the value that product lines represent for various stakeholders. As so, they support values such as many features, changeability requirements, early availability, application compatibility.