Future research

Abstract

This book extensively introduced a comprehensive framework for software product line engineering. A major challenge for future research is to specialise this framework for a given application domain such as automotive systems or medical systems. Amongst others, such a specialisation would result in a set of well-defined types for modelling domain-specific variation points, variants, variability dependencies, and constraint dependencies. Such a specialisation will increase the semantics of the models - an essential foundation for offering improved tool support and for handling the enormous complexity of the variability more effectively. For example, standardised levels of abstraction and mechanisms for mapping the concepts and the variability defined at one level to another level in a consistent manner should be the results of a domain specialisation. To gain the full benefit of a domain specialisation, it should - or better, must - include the definition of domainspecific modelling languages for defining the software development artefacts. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.