J. Brutto said
This book is a wonderful compilation of academic and real world, practical views/implementations of software product lines. It's also a wonderful text to read just to ensure you have your current perspectives aligned with your overall goals (from base development & test all the way to C-level management of an organization).
In an answer to a criticism of the book:
Sure, the book does not go into detail about how to create a software product line... however, the book does mention WHY they excluded it: it is different on a line-by-line basis and, even then, on a company-by-company basis. You need to tailer such processes to fit your business strategies and goals and cannot begin development of a product line until you have some business objectives, etc. established. Sure, they drive each other, but many other things must be in place (as the book mentions) before you can start work on the actual product line. Once you have these things in place, your product line planning/creation should become relatively transparent.
The academic examples/views are presented in base essay form with wonderful usage of references and insight into the comments made. The practical, real-world examples/views are provided in a side-bar format that allows you to easily absorb and see application of what you just read in an actual business realm.
This book will get you thinking about any projects you are currently working on, future project and just how you perceive things in general. Sure, software/code reuse is important; but to what point can that be applied to an actual product line? Where do you start drawing lines? Where do you draw lines for general goals? What business management aspects must be taken into consideration vs. running a single product? All of those questions and more are included within and will give you a wonderful starting point to deriving answers that are relevant to your business.
Don't come looking for answers, rather come looking for insight and staring points. What you can learn from this book can be easily applied to your software product line or to the development of a new product line. All you need to understand is that what you will be reading will help you understand and not overlook many aspects of the overall business plan.
T. Anderson said
This is the leading authority on Product Line Engineering (PLE). No other book comes close. This book breaks down the three PLE practice areas of Software Engineering, Technical Management, and Organizational Management and describes each in great detail. The book provides guidelines on each area and how to achieve institutionalization of your PLE process.
The book has a great patterns catalog, Software Product Line Practice Patterns. The catalog includes The Essentials Coverage pattern, Each Asset pattern, Build pattern, Product Parts pattern, Assembly Line pattern, Monitor pattern, Product Builder pattern, Cold Start pattern, In Motion pattern, Process pattern, and Factory pattern.
If you are involved with Product Line Engineering or Software Factories at all, this is a must have. You cannot do without it. If you aren't involved with Product Line Engineering or Software Factories, this is still a great read because it covers a process that should be implemented on every project. Implementing PLE makes a project reusable, predictable, maintainable, and manageable. Overall it adds measurable metrics to all the assets of a project.
Arun Acharya said
simple to understand language. Nice diagrams and the content is really arranged in a nice way
Jo K. Nash said
If you have the concept of software product lines down, this is a great book, but if not you can easily get lost or confused, so it becomes difficult reading. If you want to explore software product lines, buy this book, then while you are waiting for the book to arrive read the website http://www.softwareproductlines.com to get up to speed on the concepts.
Software product lines will become a must whether you develop enterprise software or embedded software. This is so much more than we ever discussed about software resue.....
Lars Bergstrom said
So, if you've already made the decision to go with software product lines, this is an excellent book. It's got a huge amount of reference material, is well-edited, and clearly has the benefit of a lot of practical experience.
Unfortunately, if you're debating with or just want to learn about software product lines, this book isn't for you. I didn't see a single example of when software product lines are *not* appropriate for a set of work that needs to be done and, in general, this just assumes that you already have the sort of work that fits this model and dives right into the details. Also, the "29 practices" are spread over just under 300 pages, and make it hard to understand the big picture. It would've been nice to see even one-page descriptions of the patterns in context to be able to pull it all together more easily.
Comments