Personalized cost-efficient product line implementation

Customizability is one of the most important challenges faced by software development organizations nowadays. Software products have better chances in the marketplace if they are easy to adapt to various requirements in terms of functionality, quality as well as platform or environment. The challenge becomes even more apparent with the premise of pervasive computing, where the ability to dynamically adapt to people and collaborating applications is one of the major forces. A software product line is defined as a family of products designed to take advantage of their common aspects and predicted variability. The product line approach is promising for the creation of customizable software, because variations resulting from different customer requirements are subject to careful planning and systematic reuse. Although there has been a lot of work in the research community on the early phases of product line engineering the late design and implementation phases has not been studied sufficiently. Programmers wanting to introduce flexibility in new or existing code have to consider numerous techniques at different levels of abstraction. Therefore a framework that guides this decision making process becomes necessary. The aim of this thesis is to provide an environment that supports the implementation of product line variability by considering knowledge from existing programming experiences, as well as cost-efficiency of code-level techniques.