Industry Survey of Product Lines Management Tools: Requirements, Qualities and Open Issues

PLM approaches are becoming a prominent approach in the Software Engineering and Systems Engineering PL contexts. The idea behind PLM is to focus on artifacts that are shared and that vary from one product to the other, so as to facilitate reuse and adaptation. Gains are expected in terms of time to market, consistency across products, easier identification of requirements for future products, costs reduction, better flexibility, and better management of change requirements. While most of the recent research works are focusing on methods and modeling techniques, little has been done so far with respect to PLM tools and their ability to answer industry needs. A study was thus undertaken in collaboration with a group of industrials to evaluate existing PLM tools. The purpose of the study was twofold: to understand the salient characteristics of PLM tools, and to evaluate the ability of existing tools to satisfy the expectations of industrials. The study was conducted using (a) a state of the art of PLM methods, (b) an analysis grid developed by the industrial partners to analyze the characteristics ofPM tools in general, and (c) interviews with our industrial partners. This paper reports our analysis under the form of a benchmark aimed at being used by industrials to select existing tools, and discusses open issues in the domain of RE for PL.