A survey on teaching of software product lines

With around two decades of existence, the community of Software Product Line (SPL) researchers and practitioners is thriving as can be attested by the extensive research output and the numerous successful industrial projects. Education has a key role to support the next generation of engineers to build highly complex SPLs. Yet, it is unclear how SPLs are taught, what are the possible missing gaps and difficulties faced, what are the benefits, or what is the material available. In this paper, we carry out a survey with over 30 respondents with the purpose of capturing a snapshot of the state of teaching in our community. We report and discuss quantitative as well as qualitative results of the survey. We build upon them and sketch six concrete actions to continue improving the state of practice of SPL teaching.

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