Browse Books

Reviewer: Raghvinder S Sangwan

In an era of a global economy, businesses are constantly forming strategic partnerships allowing them to introduce new products and services in potential markets around the world. In order to stay competitive, they find themselves under constant pressure to deliver these products to market at a low cost and in a short amount of time. Product-line engineering uses commonality among products in a given domain to create a highly reusable product-line platform and realizes individual products by adding product-specific features to this platform. By creating a product-line platform once for a given domain, it reduces the effort (development cost and time) required for realizing product variants within that domain. In this book, the authors have compiled some significant practices necessary for successfully implementing a product-line engineering effort in an organization. The book consists of 16 chapters divided into five parts. Part 1, chapters 1 to 3, describes an approach to creating and evaluating product-line architectures, justifying the economic investment in a product-line effort, and overcoming organizational hurdles for adopting product-line engineering in small to medium-size companies. Part 2, chapters 4 to 6, deals with modeling product-line requirements with a special emphasis on variability. Part 3, chapters 7 to 10, focus on designing product-line reference architectures using as central drivers quality requirements such as variability, flexibility, evolvability, maintainability, security, availability, and reliability. Product-line testing is discussed in Part 4, chapters 11 to 13; it uses the notion of product-line use cases and enhancements to the unified modeling language to create models that can serve as the basis for test generation. Part 5, comprising chapters 14 to 16, looks in depth at issues related to transitioning from the product-line assets resulting from domain engineering to actual products under the responsibility of application engineering. Most chapters use a systematic approach, offering background on a topic, its open research problems, a potential approach to solving these problems, case studies of industries where the solution has been applied, and evaluation of the results of these case studies. The industrial case studies, primarily from the automotive, e-business, medical, and mobile phone domains, provide valuable empirical evidence demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of a given approach. In conclusion, this book is a highly valuable resource for educators, researchers, and practitioners; it synthesizes the results of the work done by a group of European companies, research institutes, and universities on EUREKA-ITEA projects (from July 1999 to June 2005) on the topic of product-line engineering. The book will also help managers and decision makers planning to adopt product-line engineering practices at their companies gain insight into the effort involved. Online Computing Reviews Service