Economic Impact of Software Product Line Engineering Method– A Survey

Abstract

Software Engineering has to do with the art of design, development and maintenance of software products that adequately meet user's need. The key market requirements this field tries to meet are basically time to deliver, product cost and quality. With these goals in mind, software engineering researches had experienced rigorous changes in time and in space especially in the area of "software re-use". Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) leverages on building reusable components to achieve massive re-use. It is about designing systems for, and with reuse. In traditional software engineering, requirements and software architectures are engineered based on individual product alone but a product line approach requires the software expert to do same for a family of related products. Therefore, common assets are built for these related products while variable assets are also discovered which will lead to production of each specific product. This process, as it were, does not come cheap at first. There are surrounding economic, social and other consequences. This work proposes to survey the economic impact of adopting software product line engineering methods in software production. This will help software developers make sound business case as well as appropriate judgments in terms of decision making.