A Brief Survey on Product Derivation Methods in Software Product Line

Product Derivation represents one of the main challenges that a Software Product Line (SPL) faces. Deriving individual products from shared software assets is a time-consuming and an expensive activity. Until now, only few works addressed, in a limited context, a partial evaluation of a reduced number of proposed derivation approaches. The main objective of such studies was the comparison of a proposed approach regarding two or three approaches. The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to set up a framework oriented to evaluate and compare existing SPL derivation approaches. The proposed framework uses a number of criteria which help understanding the capabilities and highlight the strength and the weakness of each SPL derivation approach