Applying Open Source Software Principles in Product Lines

Abstract

Product line engineering improves the management of variability and reuse in embedded systems. It helps to exploit mass cus-tomisation leading to individualised products to the customer. It has lead to heavy development processes and many global planning for a complete range of products (a product line). Open source development does not have a strong impact in em-bedded systems companies, partially because the culture of open source developers that do not adhere to global planning and heavy processes. However, both developments need (often) distributed development, and here is the point where software product lines and open source of them can profit from achievements of each other. This paper investigates several options of using open source and its methodology in product line development to reduce the problems of distributed development and to increase the quality. A small part of the paper discusses to options for open source development to benefit from variability management of software product lines and in this way improve the possibility to customise the resulting products