According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

This paper briefly summarizes software reuse research, discusses major research contributions and unsolved problems, provides pointers to key publications, and introduces four papers selected from The Eighth International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR8).

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Software reuse research: status and future

Feature-oriented software development (FOSD) is a paradigm for the construction, customization, and synthesis of large-scale software systems. In this survey, we give an overview and a personal perspective on the roots of FOSD, connections to other software development paradigms, and recent developments in this field. Our aim is to point to connections between different lines of research and to identify open issues.

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An Overview of Feature-Oriented Software Development.

Scott Ambler, award-winning author of Building Object Applications that Work, Process Patterns, and More Process Patterns, has revised his acclaimed first book, The Object Primer. Long prized by both students and professionals as the best introduction to object-oriented technology, this book is now completely up-to-date, with all modeling notation rewritten in the just-released UML 2.0. All chapters have been revised to take advantage of Agile Modeling (AM), which is presented in the new chapter 2 along with other important new modeling techniques. Review questions at the end of each chapter allow readers to test their newly acquired knowledge. In addition, Ambler takes time to reflect on the lessons learned over the past few years by discussing the proven benefits and drawbacks of the technology. This is the perfect book for any software development professional or student seeking an introduction to the concepts and terminology of object technology. Previous Edition Pb (2001): 0-521-78519-7 Scott W. Ambler is a senior object consultant with Ronin International, Inc. and a popular speaker at conferences worldwide. He has worked with OO technology since 1990 as a business architect, system analyst, system designer, mentor, Smalltalk/C++/Java developer, and OO software process manager. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, and Mensa.

The Object Primer: Agile Model-Driven Development with UML 2.0

It is common for organizations to maintain multiple variants of a given business process, such as multiple sales processes for different products or multiple bookkeeping processes for different countries. Conventional business process modeling languages do not explicitly support the representation of such families of process variants. This gap triggered significant research efforts over the past decade, leading to an array of approaches to business process variability modeling. In general, each of these approaches extends a conventional process modeling language with constructs to capture customizable process models. A customizable process model represents a family of process variants in a way that a model of each variant can be derived by adding or deleting fragments according to customization options or according to a domain model. This survey draws up a systematic inventory of approaches to customizable process modeling and provides a comparative evaluation with the aim of identifying common and differentiating modeling features, providing criteria for selecting among multiple approaches, and identifying gaps in the state of the art. The survey puts into evidence an abundance of customizable process-modeling languages, which contrasts with a relative scarcity of available tool support and empirical comparative evaluations.

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Business Process Variability Modeling: A Survey

Product line organizations need to continuously invest into their product line infrastructure to minimize its degeneration and thus maximize its viability. Besides feedback on a strategic level to monitor changing customer requirements, technical feedback with respect to reusing product line components needs to be provided from application to family engineering. After successfully installing a product line at Testo, such a feedback loop on the technical level was established. Our strategy in this relatively small development organization was to adapt the agile practice "planning game" to their product line context. The results of three runs conducted so far show that the product line planning game is an efficient means to establish a feedback loop from application to family engineering. Testo will continue using the product line planning game in the future.

Providing Feedback from Application to Family Engineering - The Product Line Planning Game at the Testo AG

The evolution and maintenance of large-scale software systems requires first an understanding of its architecture before delving into lower-level details. Tools facilitating the architecture comprehension tasks by visualization provide different sets of configurable, graphical elements to present information to their users. We conducted a controlled experiment that exemplifies the critical role of such graphical elements when aiming at understanding the architecture. In our setting, a different configuration of graphical elements had significant influence on program comprehension tasks. In particular, a 63% gain in effectiveness in architectural analysis tasks was achieved simply by changing the configuration of the graphical elements of the same tool. Based on the results, we claim that significant effort should be spent on the configuration of architecture visualization tools and that configurability should be a requirement for such tools.

An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization

The software architecture is one of the most crucial artifacts within the lifecycle of a software system. Decisions made at the architectural level directly enable, facilitate, hamper, or interfere with the achievement of business goals as well as meeting functional and quality requirements. Software architectures are also essential for the success of product line engineering. In this work, we summarize how, from our practical experience, static architecture evaluation contributes to architecture development. We also describe the different purposes of architectural evaluations.

Static Evaluation of Software Architectures - A Short Summary

The idea of building software systems from semi-autonomous components that can be reused in numerous applications is intuitively appealing. However, simply organizing software systems in terms of components does not by itself ensure that the components will be reusable, or that significant levels of reuse will actually occur. In practice, to achieve meaningful levels of reuse the scope and generality of components must be carefully analyzed and optimized. In this paper we make the case that one of the most effective and systematic ways of achieving this is to complement component-based development with product line engineering techniques. Product line engineering not only provides concrete criteria for maximizing the reusability of components, but also provides enhanced mechanisms for reusing them withm new applications. After first outlining the pertinent features of component-based development and product line engineering, the paper explains how they can be integrated under the umbrella of a model-driven architecture (MDA) approach to software development.

Enhancing Component Reusability through Product Line Technology

Currently, modeling methods applicable to software product line architectures do not explicitly comprise refinement, which implies dealing with a lot of complexity during their application to a high number of requirements. This paper suggests the extension of a modeling method applicable to product line architectural modeling, the 4SRS (Four Step Rule Set), to support the refinement of product lines. We have used the GoPhone case study to illustrate the approach and the recursion capability of the method as a solution to the challenges of modeling product line architectures. The strength of our approach resides in its stepwise nature and in allowing the modeler to work at the user requirements level without delving into lower abstraction concerns.

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Dirk Muthig

Papers

Providing Feedback from Application to Family Engineering - The Product Line Planning Game at the Testo AG

An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization

Static Evaluation of Software Architectures - A Short Summary

Enhancing Component Reusability through Product Line Technology

Refinement of Software Product Line Architectures through Recursive Modeling Techniques