Maintaining Software Product Lines - an Industrial Practice

Improved product quality and accelerated software development through systematic reuse of common software assets have been the key attractions behind software product lines. Magnitude of improvement in industrial practices has been reported in the literature. However, experiences with software product line also showed that it is a rather challenging task to maintain software product lines and families over a long period of time. The time and resources needed to manage and maintain product lines increase and quality degrades as product lines evolve. This paper describes an industrial practice of software product line maintenance and evolution. The conventional software maintenance process is enhanced with data mining techniques to uncover lost reuse pattern and defects, maintain reuse, and reduce design erosion of product lines. Case studies with mobile phone product lines are described.