Feature-Oriented Product Line Engineering

0 7 4 0 7 4 5 9 / 0 2 / $ 1 7 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 2 I E E E FODA appeals to many product line developers because features are essential abstractions that both customers and developers understand. Customers and engineers usually speak of product characteristics in terms of the features the product has or delivers, so it’s natural and intuitive to express any commonality or variability in terms of features. A feature-based model thus provides a basis for developing, parameterizing, and configuring reusable assets. Although requirements are essential inputs for core asset development, they are not sufficient on their own; a marketing and product plan (MPP) can help propel asset development. We extended FODA into the FeatureOriented Reuse Method (FORM) not only to support architecture design and object-oriented component development but also to incorporate a marketing perspective and explore analysis and design issues from that perspective.6 With an MPP, reuse is not opportunistic; it is carefully planned for a specific product line. Our customers have applied this method to several industrial application domains to create software engineering environments and software assets for a specific product line.4 Here, we’ll use a home integration system example to show how the FORM brings efficiency to product line development.