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Software product lines represent perhaps the most exciting paradigm shift in software development since the advent of high-level programming languages. Nowhere else in software engineering have we seen such breathtaking improvements in cost, quality, time to market, and developer productivity, often registering in the order-of-magnitude range. While the underlying concepts are straightforward enough – building a family of related products or systems by planned and careful reuse of a base of generalized software development assets – the devil can be in the details, as successful product line practice can involve organizational change, business process change, and technology change. The authors ideally combine academic research results with industrial real-world experiences, thus presenting a broad view on product line engineering so that both managers and technical specialists will benefit from reading it. After presenting a common framework for the description of the industrial case studies, they capture the wealth of knowledge that eight companies have gathered during the introduction of the software product line engineering approach in their daily practice. After reading this book, you will understand all the relevant aspects, regarding business, architecture, process, and organizational issues, of applying software product line engineering. If you consider using a product line approach in your organization, or if you want to improve your current practices you will find a rich set of useful information at your fingertips – from practitioners to practitioners.

The huge proliferation of security vulnerability exploits, worms, and viruses place an incredible drain on both cost and confidence for manufacturers and consumers. The release of trustworthy code requires a specific set of skills and techniques, but this information is often dispersed and decentralized, encrypted in its own jargon and terminology,

I. Software Product Line Engineering Are you interested in producing software products or software-intensive systems at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality? If so, you are holding the right book in your hands. Software product line engineering has proven to be the methodology for Higher quality, lower developing a diversity of software products and software-intensive systems cost, and shorter at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality. Numerous reports development times document the significant achievements and experience gained by introducing software product lines in the software industry. Chapter 21 of this book summarises several cases. Concerning the terminology, there is an almost synonymous use of the terms Software product line “software product family” and “software product line”. Whereas in Europe vs. software product the term software product family is used more often, in North America the family term software product line is used more frequently. This is, among other things, reflected in the names of the two former conference series (the so- ware product line conference series, started in 2000 in the USA, and the product family engineering (PFE) workshop series, started in 1996 in Europe) which were merged in 2004 to form the leading software product line conference (SPLC) series. In this book, we use the term software product line.

This book contains the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Product Family Engineering, PFE-5. This workshop was held in Siena, Italy, November 4–6, 2003. This workshop was the fifth in the series, with the same subject, software product family engineering. These workshops have been held initially irregularly about every 18 months since 1996. Since 1999 the workshop has been held every second year in the fall. The proceedings of the second, third and fourth workshops were published as Springer LNCS volumes 1429, 1951 and 2290. The workshops were organized within co-operation projects of European industry. The first two were organized by ARES (Esprit IV 20.477) 1995–1999; this project had 3 industrial and 3 academic partners, and studied software architectures for product families. Some of the partners continued in the ITEA project if99005 ESAPS (1999–2001). ITEA is the software development programme (?! 2023) within the European Eureka initiative. ITEA projects last for 2 years, and ESAPS was succeeded by CAFÉ (ITEA if00004) for 2001–2003 and FAMILIES (ITEA if02009). This fifth workshop was initially prepared within CAFÉ and the preparation continued in FAMILIES. As usual Henk Obbink was the workshop chair, and Linda Northrop and Sergio Bandinelli were the co-chairs.

This book contains the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Product Family Engineering, PFE-4, held in Bilbao, Spain, October 3–5, 2001. This workshop was the fourth in a series started in 1996, with the same s- ject, software product-family engineering. Proceedings of the second and third workshops have been published as LNCS 1429 and LNCS 1951. The workshops were organized within co-operation projects of European - dustry, the?rst two by ARES (Esprit IV 20.477) 1995–1999. This project had three industrial and three academic partners, and focused on software archit- turesforproductfamilies.SomeofthepartnerscontinuedinITEAproject99005, ESAPS(1999–2001).ITEAisthesoftwaredevelopmentprogram(?!2023)within the European Eureka initiative. ITEA projects last for two years and ESAPS ´ was succeeded by CAFE (ITEA ip00004), which started in 2001 and will t- minate in 2003. This workshop was initially prepared within ESAPS and the ´ preparation continued in CAFE. Due to the attacks in the USA of September 11, several people were not able to?y and therefore did not show up. However, we have included their submissions in these proceedings. The session chair presented these submissions, and their inputs were used during the discussions. It was planned that Henk Obbink be workshop chair, and Linda Northrop and Sergio Bandinelli be co-chairs. However, because of personal circumstances Henk Obbink was not able to leave home during the workshop. Moreover both co-chairs had already enough other duties. Therefore the chairing duties were taken over by the program chair, Frank van der Linden.

This book contains the proceedings of a third workshop on the theme of Software Arc- tecture for Product Families. The first two workshops were organised by the ESPRIT project ARES, and were called “Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families”. Proceedings of the first workshop, held in November 1996, were only published electronically at: “http://www.dit.upm.es/~ares/”. Proceedings of the second workshop, held in February 1998, were published as Springer LNCS 1429. The ARES project was finished in February 1999. Several partners continued - operation in a larger consortium, ITEA project 99005, ESAPS. As such it is part of the European Eureka! 2023 programme. The third workshop was organised as part of the ESAPS project. In order to make the theme of the workshop more generic we decided to rename it “International Workshop on Software Architectures for Product Families”. As with the earlier two workshops we managed to bring together people working in the so- ware architecture of product families and in software product-line engineering. Submitted papers were grouped in five sessions. Moreover, we introduced two s- sions, one on configuration management and one on evolution, because we felt that d- cussion was needed on these topics, but there were no submitted papers for these subjects. Finally, we introduced a surveys session, giving an overview of the present situation in Europe, focussed on ESAPS, and in the USA, focussed on the SEI Product Line Systems Program.

This book originates from a workshop organised by ESPRIT project 20 477, ARES in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, February 1998. ARES is an acronym for Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems. Within this project we investigate techniques to deal with problems of software architecture of families of embedded systems. It is the second workshop organised by this project. Its predecessor was held in Las Navas de Marques, Spain, November 1996. The proceedings of the first workshop are only available in electronic format at'http://www.dit.upm.es/~ares/'. The second workshop succeeded, even more than the first one, in gathering many of the most prominent people working in the area of software architecture for product families or product lines. This second workshop consisted of six sessions. The first session was meant to report the ARES results, according to the topics of the next five sessions. The remaining sessions dealt with different aspects of software architecture, focussed on applications for product families or product lines. Because there will be a separate book covering all ARES results, the first session is not included in this book. The workshop was chaired by Henk Obbink from Philips Research and Paul Clements from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They prepared and presented an overall conclusion at the end of the workshop. This conclusion was used in the introduction to this book.