Evolution of Software Product Lines

A Software Product Line (SPL) aims to support the development of a family of similar software products from a common set of shared assets. SPLs represent a long-term investment and have a considerable life-span. In order to realize a return-on-investment, companies dealing with SPLs often plan their product portfolios and software engineering activities strategically over many months or years ahead. Compared to single system engineering, SPL evolution exhibits higher complexity due to the variability and the interdependencies between products. This chapter provides an overview on concepts and challenges in SPL evolution and summarizes the state of the art. For this we first describe the general process for SPL evolution and general modeling concepts to specify SPL evolution. On this base, we provide an overview on the state-of-the-art in each of the main process tasks which are migration towards SPLs, analysis of (existing) SPL evolution, planning of future SPL evolution, and implementation of SPL evolution.