Improving the development of e-business systems by introducing process-based software product lines

In the e-Business domain, workflows are central artifacts that are used to spec-ify application systems. To realize reuse at a large scale for e-Business application systems, therefore, workflows need to be reused systematically. To this end workflows must be classified, documented, and stored in a way that enables their identification, evaluation, and adaptation in order to integrate them in an application. Software product line engineering is an established and approved software engineering approach that addresses these issues by handling a number of similar software systems together, enabling large scale reuse during the development and maintenance of the different systems covered by the product line. In this paper, we transfer the concepts of software product line engineering to the domain of e-Business systems by applying the product line techniques to workflows and present initial validation results.