FeatureBased Determination of Product Line Asset Types.pdfVIP

Feature-Based Determination of Product Line Asset Types: In-house, COTS, or Open Source?1 Jaejoon Lee and Dirk Muthig Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Fraunhofer Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany {jaejoon.lee, dirk.muthig}@iese.fraunhofer.de 1 Introduction One important activity in product line engineering is product line pro- duction planning [1,2], during which stakeholders of a product line determine what and how product line assets are developed and used for product development. Moreover, decisions on which assets should be developed as in-house assets or purchased as COTS are made. Recently, there have been increasing interests in using open source software for product development [3,4]. As pointed out in [3], it seems reasonable to make some common components of a product line as open source software or acquire them from exiting open source com- munities. However, it is still not clear what a “common” component means and how it can be identified. Suppose, for example, that a switching component for voice communications in a telephony product line is a common component and is required for every product of the product line. If the overall quality of a switching system mainly de- pends on the quality of the switching component, then it may be diffi- cult to develop such components as open source software, as they may be developed based on lots of know-how of a company. Therefore, we need a systematic approach or guidelines that can be used to determine which product line assets to be developed as open source software. In this position paper, we propose a feature-based approach to identi- fying product line assets and determining their development strategies during product line production