Software product line scoping: A systematic literature review

Software product line (SPL) scoping aids companies to define the boundaries of their resources such as products, domains, and assets, the target of reuse tasks scoping technical and organizational aspects. As scoping guides the management of the resources in SPL development, it becomes one of the core activities in this process. We can find in the literature several approaches on this topic, proposing techniques and methodologies to be applicable in different organizational scenarios. However, no work comprehensively reviews such approaches and describes the advances in state of the art in the last years. In this context, we look into identifying, analyzing, and extracting detailed characteristics from SPL scoping proposals found in the literature. These characteristics allowed us to compare these approaches, reason about their applicability, and identify existing limitations and research opportunities. Thus, we conducted a systematic literature review alongside snowballing, following a well-defined protocol to retrieve, classify and extract information from the literature. We analyzed a total of 58 studies, identifying 41 different approaches in the field, highlighting their similarities and differences, and establishing a generic scoping process. Furthermore, we discuss research opportunities in the SPL scoping field.