Abstract-Many companies develop software product linescollections of similar products-by cloning and adapting artifacts of existing product variants. Transforming such cloned product variants into a "single-copy" software product line representation is considered an important software re-engineering activity, as reflected in numerous tools and methodologies available. However, development practices of companies that use cloning to implement product lines have not been systematically studied. This lack of empirical knowledge threatens the validity and applicability of approaches supporting the transformation, and impedes adoption of advanced solutions for systematic software reuse. It also hinders the attempts to improve the solutions themselves.We address this gap with an empirical study conducted to investigate the cloning culture in six industrial software product lines realized via code cloning. Our study investigates the processes, and the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the approach. We observe that cloning, while widely discouraged in literature, is still perceived as a favorable and natural reuse approach by the majority of practitioners in the studied companies. This is mainly due to its benefits such as simplicity, availability and independence of developers. Based on our observations, we outline issues preventing the adoption of systematic software reuse approaches, and identify future research directions.

Erran CarmEl is a professor in the Information technology Department at the kogod School of business at american university. professor Carmel's area of expertise is globalization of technology work. He studies global software teams, offshoring of information technology, and emergence of software industries around the world. His 1999 book Global Software Teams (published by prentice Hall) is a pioneering book on the topic. His second book, Offshoring Information Technology (coauthored with paul tjia), published in 2005 by Cambridge university press, is used in many global sourcing courses. He has written over 80 articles, reports, and manuscripts. He consults and speaks to industry and professional groups. In 2008-9, while writing this paper, he was the Orkand Chaired professor at the university of Maryland university College. He has been a Visiting professor at Haifa university (Israel) and university College Dublin (Ireland).J. albErto Espinosa is associate professor of Information technology at the kogod School of business at american university. He received his ph.D. in Information Systems from the tepper School of business at Carnegie Mellon university. His research focuses on coordination and performance in global technical projects across global boundaries, particularly across spatial and temporal distances, and coordination in large-scale technical collaboration tasks such as within-enterprise architecture.YaEl DubinskY is affiliated with the Software and Services group at the IbM Haifa research lab (Hrl). She is also a visiting member of the human-computer interaction research group in the Department of Computer and Systems Science at la Sapienza, rome, and for more than ten years has been an instructor of project-based courses in the Department of Computer Science at technion-Israel Institute of technology. Dr. Dubinsky received her b.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science and ph.D. in Science and technology Education from technion, Israel. Her research interests center on software engineering and information systems. She has significant experience guiding agile implementation processes in both industry and academia. She has presented her research at the ICSE (International Conference of Software Engineering), agile, and Xp (Extreme programming) conferences since 2002. Her book Agile Software Engineering, coauthored with Orit Hazzan, was published by Springer in 2008.abstraCt: Follow the sun (FtS) has interesting appeal-hand off work at the end of every day from one site to the next, many time zones away, in order to speed up product development. although the potential effect on "time to market" can be profound, at least conceptually, FtS has enjoyed few documented industry successes because it is acknowledged to be extremely difficult to implement. In order to address this "FtS challenge," we provide here a conceptual foundation and formal definition of FtS. We then analyze the conditions under which FtS can be successful in reducing duration in Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 03:05

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We present a framework that incorporates user-centered design (UCD) philosophy into agile software development through a three-fold integration approach: at the process life-cycle level for the selection and application of appropriate UCD methods and techniques in the right places at the right times; at the iteration level for integrating UCD concepts, roles, and activities during each agile development iteration planning; and at the development-environment level for managing and automating the sets of UCD activities through automated tools support. We also present two automated tools-UEMan and TaMUlator, which provide the realization of the development-environment level integration.