Product Line Engineering for Standard Software Customisations (PL4X)

Lightweight software product line engineering for companies operating in the ERP domain.

In this project, a tool-supported approach is developed that supports lightweight software product line engineering (SPLE) for companies operating in the ERP domain.

Motivation 
Existing SPLE approaches often require up-front investments to build reusable artifacts and require changes in the development process, organization, and technical realisation. For companies (typically SMEs) that customize and sell standard software products, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, from other software vendors, it is often unfeasible to adopt an SPLE approach as significant updates of the underlying platform make established reuse infrastructures obsolete every one to three years. To benefit from systematic reuse, companies operating in the ERP domain need lightweight approaches to quickly assess the reuse potential in their existing product customizations and means to identify domain-specific units of reuse (features) and their corresponding artifacts. A high degree of automation is required to enable systematic reuse and an early payoff before the next platform release.

Goals
Time and cost-effective estimation of the reuse potential within existing ERP system customisations and establishment of a reuse infrastructure for ERP system customisations.

Results

• Tool-supported approach for the semi-automatic analysis of the similarity of a set of ERP system customisations.
• Tool-supported approach to semi-automatically infer variability information from a set of ERP system customisations.
• Establishment of a repository for storing variability information together with the associated implementation artefacts for systematic reuse.
• Generation of hints for supporting domain analysts during the manual refinement of the inferred variability information.

Funding Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Projectnumber 841089

Duration
2011 – 2014