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Background: Surgical mortality data are collected routinely in high-income countries, yet virtually no low-or middle-income countries have outcome surveillance in place. The aim was prospectively to collect worldwide mortality data following emergency abdominal surgery, comparing findings across countries with a low, middle or high Human Development Index (HDI).Methods: This was a prospective, multicentre, cohort study. Self-selected hospitals performing emergency surgery submitted prespecified data for consecutive patients from at least one 2-week interval during July to December 2014. Postoperative mortality was analysed by hierarchical multivariable logistic regression.

An organization faces many challenging decisions when transitioning to product line development: What is the best way to adopt a product line approach? How can we avoid disrupting regular product development? Once adopted, how should we evolve the product line? The article discusses how to optimize a product line's economic benefits by considering the adoption context and using product line scoping techniques

In order to enable a smooth transition to product development for an organization that so far did only perform single system development, it is necessary to keep as much of the existing notations and approaches in place as possible. This requires adaptability of the basic variability management approach to the specific situation at hand. In this paper we describe an approach that enables homogenous variability management across the different life-cycle stages, independent of the specific notation. The approach is accompanied by a meta-model and a process for introducing the variability management approach by developing a notation-independant representation. This approach has so far been applied in several cases where our Product Line engineering method PuLSE has been introduced into a software development organization

Product line engineering can improve the ROI from a set of products. Unlike existing cost models, the authors' product line ROI model provides a comprehensive yet flexible approach to computing ROI