Towards feature-driven planning of product-line evolution

Industries that successfully apply product line approaches often operate in markets that are well established and have a strategic perspective. Consequently, such organizations have a tendency towards long-term planning of products and product lines. Although there are numerous approaches for efficient product line engineering, there is surprisingly little support for a long-term, strategic perspective and an evolution of product lines. To address these challenges, we aim to integrate evolution into model-driven product line engineering. In particular, we explore how feature models can be applied to describe the evolution of product lines. The paper contributes (i) concepts for describing the evolution of product lines with feature models, (ii) a corresponding framework, which puts this into a bigger context and (iii) three scenarios that show how this framework can be applied. The concepts are motivated with examples from automotive software engineering and embedded systems, which are industries with a strong affinity to product lines, where long term planning of the product portfolio are common strategies.