Tutorial: New Methods Behind the New Generation of Software Product Line Success Stories

A new generation of software product line success stories is being driven by a new generation of methods, tools and techniques. While early software product line case studies at the genesis of the field revealed some of the best software engineering improvement metrics seen in four decades, the latest generation of software product line success stories exhibit even greater improvements, extending benefits beyond product creation into maintenance and evolution, lowering the overall complexity of product line development, increasing the scalability of product line portfolios, and enabling organizations to make the transition to software product line practice with orders of magnitude less time, cost and effort. This tutorial explores some of the important new methods such as software mass customization sans application engineering, minimally invasive transitions, bounded product line combinatorics, and product line lifecycle management.