Customizing the PuLSE Product Line Approach to the Demands of an Organization

It is well-known that software processes need to be adapted to the specifics of the organization, the application domain, and the development techniques of the environments in which they are used. This is particularly important for reuse processes as they impact the whole software life-cycle and the reuse of artifacts creates additional relationships among multiple process instances (projects). Nevertheless the support for tailoring existing reuse approaches is at best weak. As a consequence of this realization we made customization support for the method a first rate objective while developing the Product Line Software Engineering method (PuLSE(TM)). The technology used for customization is called PuLSE(TM) Baselining and Customization (PuLSE-BC). This approach relies on an explicit characterization of the environment and the explicit connection of these characteristics to desirable properties of a process instance. In this paper, we describe the technical foundations of this approach and illustrate them with an example.