• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.8
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• pp.717-729
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• 2005

Product Line Engineering (PLE) consists of two phases; Core Assets Development and Application Engineering. The core asset development is to model common features of members in a domain and to develop them. The application engineering is to effectively generate an application by instantiating the core asset. Today, PLE research mainly focuses on developing core assets, whereas activities and instructions for application engineering are weakly defined. Moreover, instructions of application engineering are not enough to be practically applied. To widely apply PLE to industry, researches on systematic and practical methods such as instantiation processes, instructions, and artifacts are needed. In this paper, we propose a practical PLE process, instructions, and artifacts about each activity. And then, we also present a case study to show applicability and practicality of the process proposed in this paper.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.277-288
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• 2006

Product line engineering (PLE) is a new effective approach to software reuse, where applications are generated by instantiating a core asset which is a large-grained reuse unit. Hence, a core asset is a key element of PLE, and therefore the reusability of the core asset largely determines the success of PLE projects. A tore asset is a reusable part not a whole system, and supports not only variable functions but also common functions. However, there are limitations to evaluate reusability of core asset that has these unique characteristics. This paper proposes a comprehensive quality system for evaluating the reusability of core assets, based on ISO/IEC 9126. We first identify the key characteristics of core assets, and derive the set of quality attributes that characterizes the reusability of core assets. finally, we define metrics for each quality attribute. In addition, we provide guidelines for applying the metrics and perform a case study based on rental product line. Using the proposed quality system, reusability of core assets can be more effectively and correctly evaluated.