Software Product Lines: Research Issues in Engineering and Management Book Review

In my experience Product Line Engineering makes possible the highest quality of agility possible in today's software engineering processes. If used correctly, it stands the greatest chance of achieving a high level of maturity as defined by the CMMI. I know agility and CMMI are not usually used in the same context, but true agility is only achieved through predictable, repeatable, and reusable processes that enable all artifacts to be part of the reusable assets. Being on the edge of chaos, as the agilist like to say they are, only produces more chaos. Product Line Engineering strives to eliminate chaos. This book contains material that is from the first release in 2006. This is simply the soft cover version. The material is still as relevant today as it was then. The book is broken up into 5 Parts which include Product line management, Product line requirements engineering, Product line architecture, Product line testing, and Specific product line engineering issues. The book is a wealth of information. Some of the topics covered include Scenario-Based Method for Software Product Line Architecting, Experiences and Expectations Regarding the Introduction of Systematic Reuse in Small and Medium-Sized Companies, Capturing Product Line Information from Legacy User Documentation, The Orthogonal Variability Modeling Approach, Variability in Standard Languages Exemplified by UML 2.0, Dealing with Architectural Variation in Product Populations, Software Product Line Reference Architecture for Security, Product Line Use Cases: Scenario-Based Specification and Testing of Requirements, Software Product Line Engineering with the UML: Deriving Products, and Evaluation Framework for Model-Driven Product Line Engineering Tools. Anyone considering venturing into Software Product Line Engineering should read this book. It contains essential information needed to succeed. Product Line Engineering is not easy, so the more information you have from the experts the better. This book contains a ton of expert information. The book is very well written and is easy to read. The different subjects are all gone to in depth so you gain a thorough understanding of the topic. Each chapter ends with a very nice reference so you have the option of investigating the topic further. All in all I highly recommend reading this book.