Software product lines: A case study

A software product line is a family of products that share common features to meet the needs of a market area. Systematic processes have been developed to dramatically reduce the cost of a product line. Such product-line engineering processes have proven practical and effective in industrial use, but are not widely understood. The Family-Oriented Abstraction, Specification and Translation (FAST) process has been used successfully at Lucent Technologies in over 25 domains, providing productivity improvements of as much as four to one. In this paper, we show how to use FAST to document precisely the key abstractions in a domain, exploit design patterns in a generic product-line architecture, generate documentation and Java code, and automate testing to reduce costs. The paper is based on a detailed case study covering all aspects from domain analysis through testing.