Abstract:

Organizations facing the challenge of operating a large and complex product line are turning to an advanced set of explicitly defined product line engineering solutions, which have been referred to as Second Generation Systems and Software Product Line Engineering (2GPLE). 2GPLE comprises these important aspects: (1) Features serve as the lingua franca to express product differences and exercise the variation points in all assets. This extends the notion of “feature” as a way to just capture domain analysis and product descriptions; (2) Artifacts from all lifecycle phases are treated as first class citizens, not just the software. This extends PLE into a true systems and software methodology; (3) Industrial-strength but easy-to-use automation is employed to maintain configurations and turn out products; (4) a vastly simplified configuration management model; and (5) feature models with encapsulating constructs to facilitate modular and hierarchical product lines developed across organizational boundaries. This talk explains these concepts 2GPLE in depth, contrasts 2GPLE to earlier approaches to product line engineering (which include but are not limited to software product lines), and discusses some recent applications and successes.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Paul Clements is the Vice President of Customer Success at BigLever Software, Inc., where he works to spread the adoption of systems and software product line engineering. Prior to this, he was a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, where for 17 years he worked leading or co-leading projects in software product line engineering and software architecture documentation and analysis. Clements is the co-author of three practitioner-oriented books about software architecture and also co-wrote "Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns.” In addition, Clements has also authored dozens of papers in software engineering reflecting his long-standing interest in the design and specification of challenging software systems. In 2005 and 2006 he spent a year as a visiting faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. He was a founding member of the IFIP WG2.10 Working Group on Software Architecture. He received a B.S. in mathematical sciences in 1977, and a M.S. in computer science in 1980, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994. When not traveling, he lives and works in Austin, Texas, where his principal hobby is maintaining a 100-acre ranch as a wildlife management area.