Roberto Lopez Herrejon: Evolving System Variants into Software Product Lines: An Overview and the Road Ahead

Because of economical, technological and marketing reasons, today's software systems need to be built as software families where each product implements a different combination of features. Software families are commonly called Software Product Lines (SPLs) and over the past three decades they have been the subject of extensive research and application. This endeavor has produced a plethora of methods, technologies and tools that have been applied in multiple industrial domains. Despite the documented success stories, there are still several open challenges that must be addressed to reap the potential benefits of SPLs.  Salient among these challenges is providing robust and comprehensive end-to-end support for evolving existing system variants into SPLs, which is the prevailing scenario of SPL development in industry. In this talk, I will present an overview of the state-of-the-art in SPL development, what are some of the open issues in evolving system variants into SPLs, and how approaches such as search-based techniques can help to address them.