Tax-PLEASE—towards taxonomy-based software product line engineering

Modern software systems, in particular in mobile and cloud-based applications, exist in many different variants in order to adapt to changing user requirements or application contexts. Software product line engineering allows developing these software systems by managed large-scale reuse in order to achieve shorter time to market. Traditional software product line engineering approaches use a domain variability model which only captures the configuration options of the product variants, but does not provide any guideline for designing and implementing reusable artifacts. In contrast, software taxonomies structure software domains from an abstract specification of the functionality to concrete implementable variants by successive correctness-preserving refinements. In this paper, we propose a novel software product line engineering process based on a taxonomy-based domain analysis. The taxonomy’s hierarchy provides guidelines for designing and implementing the product line’s reusable artifacts while at the same time specifying possible configuration options. By deriving reusable product line artifacts from a software taxonomy, the well-defined structuring of the reusable artifacts yields improved maintainability and evolvability of the product line