Key challenges in industrial product line engineering

This paper summarizes the results of the "Gesellschaft für Informatik" (GI) working group on "Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines" which is part of the requirements engineering group within in the GI. This work group met regularly to identify the key problems in product line engineering practice with potential (and proven) solutions. While this started originally as an effort focused purely on requirements engineering issues, we soon understood that we had to take a broader perspective due to the tight interconnection of requirements engineering with other issues in a product line context. We will provide a characterization of the different organizations that participated in this effort. This will demonstrate that overall a good coverage of different types of software organizations has been achieved. We will then provide an overview of the main problems in product line development. Based on both our own experience as well as our understanding of the technology, we derived and described potential solutions for the main problems.