Inspection in Software Product Line

A software product line consists of a product line architecture, a set of reusable components and a set of products derived from the shared assets [1].

Organizations developing or acquiring systems using the product line approach have enjoyed significant (sometimes order-of magnitude) improvements in time to market, cost, productivity, and quality [2].

Benefits of Software Product Lines [3]:

• Product line development has increasingly received attention in industry as it enables organizations to reduce both cost and time of developing and maintaining increasingly complex systems.
• Successful product line development requires high quality of reusable artifacts in order to achieve the promised benefits.

Moreover, software inspection approaches implements techniques to provide qualities atributes for assets and product of software development processes, such:

• Ensure correct system is built [4]
• Assure Software Quality [3]
• Optimize the software process [5]
• Work product more readable [6]

The key challenge is the adaptation of inspections, reviews, and walkthrough techniques for use in domain and application of Software Product Lines Engineering. For example, the results of inspections, reviews, and walkthroughs, obtained in domain engineering, should be effectively compared and monitored in application engineering. Taking into consideration that the review process for reusable artifacts of product lines need to present efficient (catching faults) and not very dense (time) performance, to enable a better adoption in organizations.

[1] Jan Bosch, "Software Product Lines: Organizational Alternatives," icse,pp.0091, 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'01), 2001

[2] Paul C. Clements: A Competition of Software Product Line Economic Models. SPLC 2005: 136

[3] Christian Denger and Ronny Kolb, Testing and inspecting reusable product line components: first empirical results, ISESE'06 at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 21–22

[4]David L. Parnas, Mark Lawford: The Role of Inspection in Software Quality Assurance. IEEE Trans.Software Eng. (TSE) 29(8):674-676 (2003)

[5] H. Dieter Rombach, Marcus Ciolkowski, D. Ross Jeffery, Oliver Laitenberger, Frank E. McGarry, Forrest Shull: Impact of research on practice in the field of inspections, reviews and walkthroughs: learning from successful industrial uses. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (SIGSOFT) 33(6):26-35 (2008)

[6] Forrest Shull, Ioana Rus, Victor R. Basili: Improving Software Inspections by Using Reading Techniques. ICSE 2001:726-727