Review of the Workshop on Software Product Lines: Economics, Architectures, and Implications

Product line engineering is a recent concept and one of the hottest topics in software engineering aiming at synergy effects in software development. Diverse benefits like cost reduction, decreased time-to-market, and quality improvement can be expected from reuse of software assets. But also non-technical benefits can be expected as result of product branding, minimizing marginal costs, and sharing organizational costs. On the other hand, product lines introduce additional complexity: The planning and/or development of more than one product at a time has to be managed technically and organizationally. Following the remarkable success of the “First International Workshop on Software product lines: economics, architectures, and implications” held at ICSE 2000 in Limerick, this workshop aims at sharing conceptual and practical experience by establishing contacts and starting the discussion between experts and practitioners from academia and industry.