Feature-Oriented Software Product Lines: Concepts and Implementation

While standardization has empowered the software industry to substantially scale software development and to provide affordable software to a broad market, it often does not address smaller market segments, nor the needs and wishes of individual customers.  Software product lines reconcile mass production and standardization with mass customization in software engineering. Ideally, based on a set of reusable parts, a software manufacturer can generate a software product based on the requirements of its customer. The concept of features is central to achieving this level of automation, because features bridge the gap between the requirements the customer has and the functionality a product provides. Thus features are a central concept in all phases of product-line development.

The authors take a developer’s viewpoint, focus on the development, maintenance, and implementation of product-line variability, and especially concentrate on automated product derivation based on a user’s feature selection. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides a general introduction to feature-oriented software product lines, describing the product-line approach and introducing the product-line development process with its two elements of domain and application engineering. The pivotal part II covers a wide variety of implementation techniques including design patterns, frameworks, components, feature-oriented programming, and aspect-oriented programming, as well as tool-based approaches including preprocessors, build systems, version-control systems, and virtual separation of concerns. Finally, part III is devoted to advanced topics related to feature-oriented product lines like refactoring, feature interaction, and analysis tools specific to product lines. In addition, an appendix listsvarious helpful tools for software product-line development, along with a description of how they relate to the topics covered in this book.

To tie the book together, the authors use two running examples that are well documented in the product-line literature: data management for embedded systems, and variations of graph data structures. They start every chapter by explicitly stating the respective learning goals and finish it with a set of exercises; additional teaching material is also available online. All these features make the book ideally suited for teaching – both for academic classes and for professionals interested in self-study.

Sven Apel is the leader of the Software Product-Line Group at the University of Passau, Germany. His research interests include novel programming paradigms, software engineering and product lines, and formal and empirical methods. He is the author or coauthor of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. His work has received awards from the Ernst Denert Foundation and the Karin Witte Foundation.

Don Batory is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA.  His initial interests were in relational database implementation, and gradually expanded into product-line architectures, software generators, transformation systems, and object-oriented refactoring.  He is among the pioneers of feature-oriented software product-lines, and has given many tutorials on this topic at premier conferences over the last 15 years. 

Christian Kästner is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. His research focuses on ensuring correctness and supporting understanding of systems with variability, often with a focus on large scale and pragmatic solutions. He is the author or coauthor of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. For his PhD thesis, he received the German Computer Science Society’s Best Dissertation Award 2010.

Gunter Saake is a Professor of Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke-University in Magdeburg, Germany. He has authored more than 200 publications covering several areas of database management, formal methods and software engineering, as well as several graduate textbooks on Java, on database technology, and a general introductory book for computer science students.