We’re taking part in next week’s Working Meeting on “Models and Aspects for Product Families: A Roadmap for Research” at the University of Lancaster. Danilo Beuche of pure-systems will also be there, and between us we’ve put together a presentation titled: “Aspects and Models - the tool vendor’s perspective”.

Abstract: “As tool vendors we are interested in providing solutions that benefit our customers in some way. Such benefits can potentially be realized in the combination of Aspects and Models. Since our core product is a Feature Modelling toolset for Software Product Line development, our main area of interest is naturally the combination of Aspects with Feature Modelling.

Here we have identified a number of potential benefits and a number of problem areas. However, even if these benefits can be realized and these problems be solved, there still remains the issue of building an economic case for tool adoption. The adoption process should ideally be reasonably straightforward for organisations, and the benefits of using the tool need to be predictable, and measurable, in order to justify the customer’s purchase and on-going usage.”

The purpose of the meeting is to prepare a roadmap for future research in this area. Hopefully this will include further work on combining Aspect-Oriented Development with Feature Modelling…