Evolving standard process reference models for product line development

Component Based Development (CBD) significantly improves software engineering by enabling and enforcing reuse and as a consequence productivity and quality. Product Line development (PLD) concepts in addition promise increased uniformity with respect to external appearance of software products and internal structure of reusable artefacts ("assets') beyond a single product for a whole range of products. Key to successful software component reuse and to Software Product Line development is the management of product variations within specified architected limits by providing controlled variations of constituent software components within specified over-all product characteristics. This cannot be an afterthought it has to be modelled from the very beginning. Current process models and process standards often lack an adequate orientation to and consideration of cross-product uniformity and variation, resulting in problems during the enactment of a Product Line approach: the desirable variation within the software products cannot be described. To reap the benefits of the advantages of PLD variability all subprocesses of the development process have to be analyzed in order to identify necessary evolvement towards a PLD approach. In this paper we describe a possible high-level structuring of a Product Line methodology process, analyze the ISO/IEC 12207 process framework and identify processes where the consideration of controlled product variation may require special support and re-orientation of the process. We further characterize the support necessary for relevant subprocesses.