Tool Support for Product Derivation in Large-Scale Product Lines: A Wizard-based Approach

Product line engineering has rapidly emerged as a viable and important software development activity during the last few years. Many companies use a product line approach so as to be able to build different variants of their products for use within a variety of systems. As the size of product lines is usually large, they could easily incorporate thousands of variation points and configuration parameters. This makes product line management and systematic product derivation extremely difficult. This workshop aims at elaborating on the idea of using visualisation techniques to achieve the economies of scale required to support variability management and product derivation in industrial product lines. Visualisation techniques have been proven effective to improve both the human understanding and effective use of computer software. They have also been used to amplify the cognition about large and complex data sets. The exploration of the potential of visual representations such as trees and graphs combined with the effective use of human interaction techniques such as dynamic queries, direct manipulation, and details-on-demand when applied in a software product line context is a novel and challenging research direction in software product line engineering.