An experience report on the incremental adoption and evolution of an SPL in eHealth

Abstract

This work presents an experience report on the evolutionary development of a software product line (SPL) in the eHealth domain. The effort was triggered by the concurrent development of two similar products and the ambition to reduce redundant development and quality assurance. The result is a scalable base for a complex, highly adaptable information system. This system is required to be applicable in multiple business domains and diverging environments ranging from large scale hospitals to single practitioner clinics.During this effort we were able to extract the common denominator in the form of core assets from existing applications specific to a medical field. For customisations well defined variation points were developed. Our solution allows for easy implementation of medical documentation requirements compared to tedious development of new applications from scratch. It significantly reduced the necessary development effort and time to market. The resulting core documentation platform can be used for an arbitrary medical field completely eliminating the dependence on the specific customer domain.