Software Product Lines: What got us here, won’t get us there

Jan Bosch is VP, Engineering Process at Intuit Inc. Earlier, he was head of the Software and Application Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research Center, Finland. Before joining Nokia, he headed the software engineering research group at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he holds a professorship in software engineering. He received a MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden. His research activities include software architecture design, software product families, software variability management and component-oriented programming. He is the author of a book "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press), (co-)editor of several books and volumes in, among others, the Springer LNCS series and (co-)author of a significant number of research articles. He is editor for Science of Computer Programming, has been guest editor for journal issues, chaired several conferences as general and program chair, served on many program committees and organized numerous workshops.

As a consultant, as a professor and as an employee, Jan has worked with and for many companies on strategic reuse in general and software product lines specifically, including Philips, Thales Naval Netherlands, Robert Bosch GmbH, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, Tellabs, Avaya, Tieto Enator and Det Norska Veritas. Around software product lines, he has published on, advised and implemented specific techniques and methods around, among others, software architecture, software variability management, the link to business strategy, organizational models, assessment frameworks, adoption frameworks and quality attributes. More information about his background can be found at his website: www.janbosch.com.

Meet Jan for lunch at PPL2009

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Software Product Lines in Practice - A Fraunhofer Experience Report

Dr. H. Dieter Rombach is a Full Professor in the Fachbereich Informatik (i.e., Department of Computer Science) at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany. He holds a chair in software engineering, is executive and founding director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE),. which aims at shortening the time needed for transferring research technologies into industrial practice. This Institute employs about 180 scientists, operates a sister institute at the University of Maryland, USA (about 25 scientists), and finances about 75% of its operating budget via industry projects. His research interests are in software methodologies, modeling and measurement of the software process and resulting products, software reuse, and distributed systems. In addition, he is a member of the board of the overall Fraunhofer organization. In that role he chairs the ICT group (13 institutes, 3000 scientists) of Fraunhofer. Results of his research are documented in more than 150 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. He is co-author of the book entitled “A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories” published by Addison Wesley, 2003.

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Platform diversity and Innovation in electron microscopes

Dirk-Jan Swagerman works as a director of software engineering at FEI Company. His focus is currently on people management, software processes, outsourcing and helping to rationalize business decisions by providing objective metrics. Dirk-Jan drove the introduction of a global software process for FEI based on a pragmatic but robust cocktail of RUP, Agile SCRUM and test-driven development. He hugely enjoys the multi-site, multi-disciplinary and multi-market environment at FEI. In nearly 20 years experience he has filled software engineering, architecture, team leading and project leading roles in several different software environments.

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Language Workbenches and Software Product Lines

Markus Völter works as an independent consultant and coach for software technology and engineering for itemis Stuttgart. He focuses on software architecture, model-driven software development and domain specific languages as well as on product line engineering. Markus is (co-) author of many magazine articles, patterns and books on middleware and model-driven software development. He is a regular speaker at conferences world wide. Markus can be reached at voelter at acm dot org or via www.voelter.de.

Meet Markus for lunch at PPL2009

Read Markus's interview (Dutch only) on Product Lines and Model-Driven Software Development for Bits&Chips magazine