Experience Report on Variability Improvement in a Product Line Engineering Unaware Company

Product Line Engineering (PLE) enables strategic reuse within an organisation, thus reducing development costs, decreasing the time to market, and increasing product quality. As a core activity in PLE, variability management supports modelling of commonality and variability throughout the engineering life cycle. Given the increased complexity of modern software-intensive systems, variability management is becoming increasingly important. Transitioning to PLE approaches is a challenging task, as potential benefits must be carefully weighed against costs introduced by PLE approaches. This paper presents a collaborative approach for reverse-engineering variability and configuration knowledge with minimal domain expert involvement and provides insights into the experience we gained from our industrial collaboration.