Software product lines have recently been introduced as one of the most promising advances for efficient software development. Yet upon close examination, there are few guidelines or methodologies available to develop and deploy product lines beyond existing domain engineering approaches. The latter have had mixed success within commercial enterprises because of their deployment complexity, lack of customizability, and especially their misplaced focus, that is on domains as opposed to products.To tackle these problems we developed the PuLSETM (&oduct Line software Engineering) methodology for the purpose of enabling the conception and deployment of software product lines within a large variety of enterprise contexts. This is achieved via product-centric focus throughout the phases of PuLSETM, customizability of its components, incremental introduction capability, maturity scale for structured evolution, and adaptations to a few main product development situations.PuLSETM is the result of a bottom-up effort: the methodology captures and leverages the results (the lessons learned) Corn our technology transfer activities with our industrial customers. We present in this paper the main ideas behind PuLSETM and illustrate the methodology with a running example taken from our transfer experience.

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The creation and validation of product line software architectures are inherently more complex than those of software architectures for single systems. This paper compares a process for creating and evaluating a traditional, one-ofa-kind software architecture with one for a reference software architecture. The comparison is done in the context of PuLSE-DSSA, a customizable process that integrates both product line architecture creation and evaluation.