Evaluating Company’s Readiness for Adopting Product Line Engineering: a Second Evaluation Round

Abstract

Product lines have emerged in the software industry as an attractive approach to perform planned reuse of code. Nevertheless, a product line solution is not appropriate in all cases and also requires some conditions to be implemented successfully. The literature offers several contributions regarding the adoption of product lines. However, only a few of them are able to support decision-makers in making informed decisions in favor of or against following this approach. We proposed APPLIES, a framework for evaluating the organization's motivation and preparation for adopting product lines. This article presents the second version of the APPLIES framework as well as the second iteration of the evaluation of this approach. This evaluation consisted of (i) a workshop with a practitioner who had experience in adopting the product line production approach and; (ii) a review of the content by five product line experts. The results obtained from the evaluation resulted in modifications to the framework content, mainly to simplify the statements and eliminate redundant elements. Also, we detected new functionalities and modifications that we expect to be resolved in the following evaluation iterations. Further evaluations and improvements are needed to mature the framework. Moreover, we expect to incorporate APPLIES into a process that covers the aspects that a company must consider before deciding to adopt this production paradigm.

A multi-company empirical evaluation of a framework that evaluates the convenience of adopting product line engineering

“…Seven of the nine participants responded they would recommend APPLIES and all participants that responded the questionnaire would use it ( ≥ 4). All these results are consistent with what had been found in previous evaluations of APPLIES as can be corroborated in our previous work [14,16,17].…”

“…The format for capturing responses remained the same across all versions of APPLIES for the motivation part, but modified in this evaluation for the preparation part. This result is positive because while in previous evaluations (see [14,16,17]) negative comments were received on the format used to capture responses, in this evaluation no negative comments were received on this regard.…”

“…It is worth noting that the version of APPLIES used by the participants in this evaluation is slightly different from the version that Rincon et al [16] present. It has instructions for using APPLIES without the researcher's guide and the response options on the Likert scale that goes from Totally to Never with six possible values in total and include the N/A option.…”

“…Decision-makers can use this information to identify why product line engineering would or would not be convenient for their business. Space restrictions prevent the full presentation of APPLIES in this article, but full details are available in previous publications [15,16].…”

“…In previous work we proposed APPLIES, a framework that helps companies to self-assess the convenience of adopting PLE [15,16]. To this end, this framework helps companies to evaluate their motivation to make the change and their preparedness to carry it out successfully 1 .…”