Scoping Software Product Lines. An Analysis of an Emerging Technology

Software Product Line development is a rather new topic area within domain-specific software engineering that builds on previous work in domain engineering. A crucial step in developing a product line is the scoping step, which aims at determining the boundaries for the product line. This is one of the core planning activities which may determine success or failure of the whole product line effort. In this paper, we aim at analyzing the existing body of knowledge on product line scoping. As the relation to domain engineering is very tight we will also include domain scoping approaches in our analysis. Further, we will look at product line scoping related activities in other fields of study besides software engineering. As a result of this survey we provide a taxonomy of existing approaches both on a problem level, as well as on a solution level, discuss the relative advantages of the various approaches, and show some ways on using the results of this paper for enhancing existing scoping approaches and developing new approaches.