Introduction

In the previous chapters of this book, it has been established that software product lines (SPL) have become one of the most popular means to providing a flexible product portfolio while achieving a short time-to-market. By reusing overlapping functionality, production time and cost of development can be significantly reduced for families of products (Pohl et al., 2005). But this increased flexibility comes at a price as software developers are faced with a considerable increase of complexity when designing the software product line.

Where the development of traditional software systems already requires substantial amounts of information, the development of SPLs involves even larger quantities of information. As an SPL supports a range of products, detailed information on all these products is required for SPL engineering. In addition, information is required on how the variability among these products is to be supported, what the design of the SPL infrastructure will look like and how the SPL will be aligned with market.