Goetz Botterweck

Industries that successfully apply product line approaches often operate in markets that are well established and have a strategic perspective. Consequently, such organizations have a tendency towards long-term planning of products and product lines. Although there are numerous approaches for ecient product line engineering, there is surprisingly little support for a long-term, strategic perspective and an evolu- tion of product lines. To address these challenges, we aim to integrate evolution into model-driven product line engi- neering. In particular, we explore how feature models can be applied to describe the evolution of product lines. The paper contributes (i) concepts for describing the evolution of product lines with feature models, (ii) a corresponding framework, which puts this into a bigger context and (iii) three scenarios that show how this framework can be ap- plied. The concepts are motivated with examples from au- tomotive software engineering and embedded systems, which are industries with a strong anity to product lines, where long term planning of the product portfolio are common strategies.