Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Product LinE Approaches in Software Engineering, PLEASE 2012, Zurich, Switzerland, June 4, 2012

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is an engineering technique that aims to take advantage of commonalities and variabilities among a family of similar software products. By adopting SPLE practices, organizations are able to achieve significant improvement in time-to-market, engineering and maintenance costs, portfolio size, and quality. However, despite the benefits of SPLE over traditional reuse approaches and some successful applications, in broad industrial practice SPLE is still in the early adopter stage. Numerous industrial companies, especially in the consumer electronics, automotive, aerospace and defense and other industrial domains develop and maintain families of related products. In many cases, they tend to use practice-based, ad-hoc, opportunistic reuse techniques rather than strategic reuse techniques promoted by the product line engineering approach. While sufficient for a limited number of products, ad-hoc reuse techniques do not scale in the long run and result in increased complexity, as well as in inability to sustain the desired quality level. One result is that the development and maintenance effort may increase. The range of reported problems vary from organizational, governmental, and process issues to challenges related to engineering tools, design and testing methodologies. To address the described situation, the PLEASE workshop aims to create and sustain long-term interactions among software engineering practitioners and researchers from industry and academia in order to couple real-life industrial problems with concrete solutions developed by the community. These goals are in the spirit of moving researchers and industrial practitioners into Pasteur s Quadrant.