Managing the Evolution of Software Product Lines

Software product lines are a very promising approach to software reuse. Because all product line members are derived from the same assets, product lines are very sensitive to evolutionary changes of these assets. Wrong decisions on how to handle these changes may lead to serious technical or economic problems that may even result in a failure of the whole product line. On the other hand, there are certain kinds of changes that product lines can cope much better with than single systems can. The paper categorizes software evolution into different kinds and gives guidelines on how to handle these, depending on their sources and (potential) effects.