Scoping Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software product line development is a rather new topic area within domain-specific software engineering that builds on previous work in domain engineering. A crucial step in developing a product line is the scoping step, which seeks to determine the boundaries of the product line. This is one of the core planning activities that may determine the success or failure of the whole product line effort. In this paper, we seek to analyze the existing body of knowledge on product line scoping. As the relationship to domain engineering is very close, we also include domain scoping approaches in our analysis. Further, we look at activities related to product line scoping in fields of study other than software engineering. As a result of this survey we provide a taxonomy of existing approaches on both a problem level and a solution level. We also discuss the relative advantages of the various approaches, and show some ways of using our results for enhancing existing scoping approaches and developing new ones.