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2005
Conference Proceeding
Titel
First eWorkshop on Quality Assurance for Software Product Lines: Strategic Issues
Abstract
The importance of quality assurance for software product lines and the need for effective and efficient techniques and methods for assuring quality in the context of product line engineering has recently been recognized by the product line community. Today, more and more practitioners and researchers are investigating ways of improving quality assurance techniques and processes, as well as develop concrete techniques for ensuring the quality of reusable components or products in a product line. However, strategic issues like organization, planning of product line quality assurance, or economic impacts have not been investigated in detail so far. On December 8, 2004, therefore, the PuLSE team of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Germany conducted a eWorkshop to establish viable discussions among experts on experience, ideas, and solutions related to the strategic issues of quality assurance for software product lines, especially its impact on organizations and economics. A eWorkshop stands for an arrangement that enables invited experts and authorities within a certain area to discuss a topic remotely by using a web-based chat tool. The workshop was supported by VSEK (see www.software-kompetenz.de), a German internet portal providing empirical knowledge on software engineering technologies to the German public. VSEK is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This report summarizes the results of the eWorkshop. The main findings of the eWorkshop are (a) quality assurance is more important for product lines than for traditional single systems, (b) product line engineering has a strong impact on an organization and its processes, (c) the two unique product line factors with respect to quality assurance are variability and scale, (d) there are new or different quality assurance activities or processes for software product lines, (e) the emphasis of product line quality assurance should be on unit testing as well as testing and evaluating the product line architecture, (f) a poor quality assur-ance strategy can negate the economic gains of product lines, and (g) if an organization wants to move towards product line engineering it must spent as much effort on quality assurance as on the construction of a product line infrastructure. Altogether, this first workshop has been a very large success, due to the level of participation of the invited experts and the quality of their statements. All participants voted to have another eWorkshop to discuss role of quality assurance in a product line business case.
Verlagsort
Kaiserslautern