Adding More Agility to Software Product Line Methods: A Feasibility Study on Its Customization Using Agile Practices

Software Product Line Methods (SPLMs) have been continuously gaining attention, especially in practice, for on one hand, they address diverse market needs while controlling costs by planned systematic reuse in core assets development (domain engineering), and on another hand, they reduce products' time-to-market, achieving a certain level of agility in product development (application engineering). More cost-effective and agile as they are than traditional development methods for producing families of similar products, SPLMs still seem to be heavy weight in nature. In SPLMs, significant up-front commitments are involved in development of a flexible product platform, which will be modified into a range of products sharing common features. Agile Methods (AMs) share similar goals with SPLMs, e.g., on rapidly delivering high quality software that meets the changing needs of stakeholders. However, they appear to differ significantly practices. The purpose of this work is to compare Agile and Software Product line approaches from fundamental goals/principles, engineering, software quality assurance, sand project management perspectives, etc. The results of the study can be used to determine the feasibility of tailoring a software product line approach with Agile practices, resulting in a lighter-weight approach that provides mass customization, reduced time-to-market, and improved customer satisfaction.