Decade of product line practices in industry

Software product line is a paradigm that develops high quality similar software products in a short time at low cost. Over the past two decades, product lines have been applied across industries such as defense, aerospace, automotive, medical, consumer and service industries. Companies of these industrial domains have shared their SPL practices through SPLC, a software product line conference, and SPLC nominated excellent practices through the Hall of Fame. The status of the SPL organizations has not been compiled since the analysis of the CMU /SEI in the early 2000s. In this paper, we analyzed industrial practices reported in SPLC for the past 10 years in terms of industrial domain types, major SPL techniques used, product size and types of organizations that conduct SPL applications. The findings indicate that the majority of the SPL practices are the automobile domain and feature model is the most commonly adopted technique for handling variability. The study also presents the diversity and evolution in SPL life cycle processes as well as the types of organizations and their capability. Moreover, the results depict that there is much uncertainty about the types of applied SPL life cycle process.