Involved Researchers: Yaser Ghanam, Frank Maurer
Bridging agile software development and software product line engineering.
Agile software development (ASD) and software product line engineering (SPLE) seem to be two rewarding yet disparate schools of thoughts in software engineering. ASD encourages strong business involvement in development activities, focuses only on the requirements at hand, and deems huge investment in requirement and design upfront unjustifiable. On the other hand, SPLE considers intensive domain analysis and flexible & detailed software design as prerequisites to any development effort. SPLE plans for potential future projects, and dedicates considerable resources for preplanning efforts.
Integrating ASD and SPLE, although is challenging, has a huge potential of magnifying enhancements in quality, cuts in cost and reductions in time-to-market. Our research is focused on this integration. We propose a model that enables agile organizations to establish product lines without disturbing the agility of their practices. The model is a bottom-up application driven approach that relies on automated acceptance tests to derive core assets from existing code.
This special issue of Software: Practice and Experience invites submissions of original research on Agile Product Line Engineering. We are particularly interested in applied research on bridging and combining the different aspects of Agile Software Development (ASD) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). We also welcome case studies and experience reports demonstrating practical experiences of attempts to blend the two software paradigms.
After an interesting first version of the workshop in Sardinia last year, Trondheim is hosting the second workshop this year.. The goal of this workshop is to bring together people who are using or want to use agile approaches in the development of software product lines (SPLs). We plan to discuss the similar goals but different philosophies of agile and SPL techniques, and explore to what degree they can/should be integrated, and how this integration could/should happen.
Workshop Details and Call for Papers
We organized a half-day workshop on Agile Product Line Engineering in conjunction with the XP 2009 conference in Italy (May 25-30). The goal of the workshop was to bring together people who are using or want to use agile approaches in the development of software product lines (SPLs). We discussed the similar goals but different philosophies of agile and SPL techniques, and explored to what degree they could/should be integrated, and how this integration could/should happen.
Check out the detailed proceedings of the workshop..
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