Software Product Lines

About this course

To meet various customer requirements, to ensure availability on different platforms, or to satisfy business goals and marketing strategies, today’s software products typically need to be released in multiple variants. As a consequence, software development is faced with the challenge of producing and maintaining flexible software systems which can be customized through several configuration options.

This fact may result in many combinations of configuration options which may too many to maintain an overview of the entirety of software variants that implement these configurations. For the Linux kernel, a prominent example of a highly configurable software system, we may easily create a dedicated variant for every person on earth - it is even assumed that we could create more Linux variants than atoms in the universe.

In this course, we gradually dive into the active research field of engineering software product lines. After reviewing classical approaches for developing variable software in an ad-hoc manner, we introduce systematic methods and techniques amenable to software mass-customization by generating individual software products based on an integrated platform, following the idea of product line engineering known from traditional manufacturing and engineering disciplines. The course demonstrates how configurability of software systems can be modeled and analyzed, which variability implementation techniques can be used by fostering software reuse and dedicated variation points, and which strategies allow for testing the huge number of software variants that exponentially grows with the number of configuration options.

Organisation

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with basic software engineering concepts.

Learning outcomes

You will learn:

Schedule (Fall Semester 2024)

DateTopic
17-09Introduction
24-09Runtime Variability and Design Patterns
01-10Compile-Time Variability with Clone-and-Own
08-10Feature Modeling (Part 1)
15-10Feature Modeling (Part 2)
22-10Conditional Compilation
29-10Modular Features
05-11Languages for Features
12-11Development Process
19-11Feature Interactions
26-11Product-Line Analyses
03-12Product-Line Testing
10-12Research Input
17-12Q&A

Exam

Repetition exam