Evaluating Company's Readiness for Adopting Product Line Engineering: a Second Evaluation Round
Luisa Rincón, Centre de Recherche en Informatique (CRI), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France, Raúl Mazo, Camille Salinesi, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana-Cali, Cali, Colombia, Centre de Recherche en Informatique (CRI), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France, GiDITIC, Universidad EAFIT, Medellin, Colombia, Centre de Recherche en Informatique (CRI), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France
2018
Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly
Product lines have emerged in the software industry as an attractive approach to perform planned reuse of code. Nevertheless, a product line solution is not appropriate in all cases and also requires some conditions to be implemented successfully. The literature offers several contributions regarding the adoption of product lines. However, only a few of them are able to support decision-makers in making informed decisions in favor of or against following this approach. We proposed APPLIES, a
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... mework for evaluating the organization's motivation and preparation for adopting product lines. This article presents the second version of the APPLIES framework as well as the second iteration of the evaluation of this approach. This evaluation consisted of (i) a workshop with a practitioner who had experience in adopting the product line production approach and; (ii) a review of the content by five product line experts. The results obtained from the evaluation resulted in modifications to the framework content, mainly to simplify the statements and eliminate redundant elements. Also, we detected new functionalities and modifications that we expect to be resolved in the following evaluation iterations. Further evaluations and improvements are needed to mature the framework. Moreover, we expect to incorporate APPLIES into a process that covers the aspects that a company must consider before deciding to adopt this production paradigm. 70 assets in a prescribed way [1] . Product Line Engineering (PLE) is a systematic and comprehensive process aimed to develop and maintain product lines. Product line engineering helps companies to reduce their efforts through two key aspects: systematic variability management and planned reuse. However, like any initiative that involves organizational change, adopting a product line engineering approach entails challenges that not all organizations are prepared to face. For instance, Brockers [2] mentioned that the way in which the insurance industry develops software results in a significant obstacle for introducing a product line engineering approach. One reason of these difficulties is that the knowledge needed to define a product line is distributed among insurance companies and software vendors, while another reason is the speed of innovation required by the insurance sector. Also, despite the advances in validation and certification of products derived from a product line [3], Habli and Kelly [4] determined that these concerns are barriers to implement product lines in safety-critical industries such as avionics. Adopting a product line production approach is a change initiative that aims to benefit the business by improving its competitiveness and profitability. However, it is also well-known that change initiatives are time-consuming and costly [5] , which explains why different authors encourage evaluating the change readiness before introducing any change in the organization [6]- [9] . In that sense, we hypothesize that assessing a company's change readiness is important in helping decision-makers to decide whether or not to adopt a product line. Previous studies have reported that both motivation and preparation are factors that affect the effectiveness of organizations in implementing change. Particularly, Armenakis et al. [8] proposed two key components to achieve the change readiness: (i) the belief that the change is needed, which means there is motivation to perform the change; and (ii) the belief that the individuals and the organization have the capacity to undertake the change [8], which means they are prepared to do it. However, while there has been significant effort spent in the product line community to plan and monitor the adoption of a product line [10]- [29] , less attention has been given to help companies to evaluate their motivation and preparation for adopting a product line solution. An alternative to address this need is to hire an external consulting team who provides expert opinion. In this case, the Product Line Technical Probe (PLTP) or the Product Line Quick Look (PLQL) approaches are ideal solutions [30] . However, none of those alternatives are available in the public domain, and anyone interested in assessing his organization must request the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for a consulting regarding PLTP or a PLQL and pay the corresponding consulting services. Another alternative is to use free-access approaches. For instance, Schmid and John [31] evaluate whether a specific domain has sufficient potential for the reuse. Fritsch and Hahn [32] propose a method to evaluate whether a systematic product line development would be helpful for an organization according to its target market and the set of potential products. Tüzün et al. [33] propose a decision support system to help companies to evaluate whether adopting a product line is feasible or not in their organization and to select a transition strategy to migrate towards a product line approach. Finally, Mazo et al. [34] propose a process and a collection of tables to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of a product line production strategy in the software industry. However, none of these approaches evaluate why a product line approach might be useful for a company in the first place, and they only consider a reduced set of assessment criteria to evaluate company preparation for adopting this paradigm. Given the above observations, the general goal of our research is guided by the following research question: how to help companies to evaluate their motivation and preparation for adopting a product line approach? As an alternative we created APPLIES [35], a framework for evaluAting organization's motivation and Preparation for adoPting product LInES. This framework allows stakeholders to assess and prioritize factors that motivate the organization to adopt a SPL. In addition, APPLIES 71 evaluates success factors that denote preparation for adopting a product line engineering approach. APPLIES was developed and improved iteratively. We follow a design-science methodology where the framework itself and all the related materials and tools are designed, evaluated and improved as they are evaluated in different scenarios. The design science methodology includes six activities: problem identification and motivation, definition of the objectives for a solution, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, and communication [36] . The first two activities were previously mentioned in this introduction, and the other activities have been carried out iteratively. Two iterations were carried out in order to release APPLIES version 2.0.a1. Iteration 1: A literature review was conducted (i) to identify the key factors that drive companies into a product line approach, and (ii) to identify the key factors to evaluate the company's preparation to adopt a product line. Based on this review, a first version of the framework (version 1.0.a1) was developed and reviewed internally by the research team. Then, some adjustments were made to this version and a next version (1.0.a2) was delivered and evaluated with a survey and an interview with two researchers in the PLE field. This preliminary evaluation led to the identification of minor issues such as unclear definitions that produced misunderstandings. Details of this iteration were published in [35] . Iteration 2: Version 1.0.a2 was evaluated by a practitioner and five SPL academics with industry experience. Feedback received in both evaluations activities were the basis to design a new version of the framework (i.e., APPLIES v-2.0.a1). This article reports the details of Iteration 2 that had two evaluations: a workshop with a practitioner with experience in adopting product line engineering, and an evaluation based on the judgment of five experts in PLE. As a result of these evaluations, the research team collected suggestions and observations to improve the APPLIES framework and release a new version named APPLIES v-2.0.a1. The results of the retrospective evaluation were encouraging because they indicate that APPLIES is perceived as useful and could be valuable to software companies considering PL adoption. Regarding the evaluation with experts, their suggestions led to improvements to unify redundant content, eliminate unnecessary items and simplify the text of some others that were incorporated in the version presented here. However, some findings, described in the evaluation section (Section 3), have not yet been incorporated into the framework because we want to collect further evidence before deciding how to manage them. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: The design and development of the framework are explained in Section 2. Section 3 presents the empirical evaluation. Section 4 highlights major-related work and shows the novelty and complimentary issues of the APPLIES framework regarding related work. Finally, Section 5 presents the conclusions and future research.
doi:10.7250/csimq.2018-17.04
fatcat:xpth6cwn4nc2lngcqlumiu2s3q
