The International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) is the most important event that covers the full range of Product Line Engineering in software-intensive products. Its 15th incarnation will take place in the Munich City Center from August 21st to August 26th.
According to the CMU SEI (Carnegie-Mellon University Software Engineering Institute ) a software product line is defined as
a set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way.
Software product lines are important as they enable systematic reuse instead of ad-hoc reuse on a large scale. For this purpose, the product line platform provides a set of core assets such as components, test plans, documents that are relevant for all products supposed to be in the scope of the product line. Building software product lines and in particular their architectures, however, is very challenging because they must be able to cope with all commonalities and variability across the targeted products. This is the reason why there is still so much research and industrial practice necessary to raise the maturity of the field.
The SPLC conference attempts to receive interesting contributions from both industry and research every year. The program committee as well as the list of speakers comprise some of the best known experts in software architecture. Hence, the event also provides a great opportunity for networking.
The upcoming SPLC in Munich will offer many interesting topics. Off course, there will be a large program full of submitted papers. And there will be a whole bunch of tutorials. For example, ones about development, operation, or requirements management for as well as tutorials covering tools, industry trends, DSLs, and real-world experiences.
Keynotes will be given by
- Reinhold Achatz, Corporate Vice President of SIEMENS AG, Advisory Professor at Tsingua University in Beijing, China
- Manfred Broy, full Professor at Technische Universität München, and
- Mike Hinchey, Director of Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre and Professor of Software Engineering at University of Limerick, Ireland.
Last but not least there’ll be two panels, one on “Standards for Variability Modeling” and another one on “The End of the Line” dealing how to recognize that a product line has reached the end of its lifetime, and how to manage this.
In conclusion, the venue and the program appear very attractive. So if you are interested in the details of the program you may download the preliminary program schedule.
