Patterns for Product Line Engineering

Introduction Software Product Line Engineering (PLE) has become an important way of building and reusing software. In PLE, the focus is shifted from building isolated products to building families of related products, while reuse is discussed not at an individual object level , e.g. libraries or components, but as a whole: organizational, process wise, and also life cycle wise end to end from requirements to actually deployed variability at the customer. We consider only those platforms PLE efforts that are planned and prescribed to be reused in a dedicated product portfolio or to build solutions in a specific market segment, hence typical general purpose technology platforms, such as Eclipse, JBoss, or .NET, do not fall into this category.