Light-weight software product lines for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

  • Authors:

  • Ebrahim Bagheri;Faezeh Ensan

  • Affiliations:

  • Ryerson University;Athabasca University

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '13 Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Product line engineering practices promote the idea of systematic reuse of core assets and have been reported to decrease time-to-market and development costs for new products. However, our recent efforts to transfer our product line engineering knowledge to several of our small and medium-size enterprise industrial partner showed that there are challenges that need to be addressed before core product line engineering ideas can be deployed in SME context. These challenges include upfront investment costs, business traceability, levels of abstraction of functional features and semantic distinction between functional and non-functional software aspects. In order to address these challenges within the context of SMEs, we adopt and extend the behavior-driven development methodology in a way to not only offer agility in practice but also to equip software developers with the means to capture and manage software variability within the behavior-driven development process. We introduce the details of the extended methodology and discuss its advantages and disadvantages in detail.