Software Product Line Engineering with Feature Models

One increasing trend in software development is the need to develop multiple, similar software products instead of just a single individual product. There are several reasons for this. Products that are being developed for the international market must be adapted for different legal or cultural environments, as well as for different languages, and so must provide adapted user interfaces. Because of cost and time constraints it is not possible for software developers to develop a new product from scratch for each new customer, and so software reuse must be increased. These types of problems typically occur in portal or embedded applications, e.g. vehicle control applications [Ste04]. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) offers a solution to these not quite new, but increasingly challenging, problems [Cle01].