I’m at the annual Software Product Lines Conference this week in Limerick, Ireland.

Today has been my busiest day – a panel to chair and a demo session to give.

First up was the panel on Product Line Scoping in Practice. I was lucky to have a great selection of panellists with wide experience of product line scoping. Danilo Beuche of pure-systems has been around the product line scene for a while, as a researcher, as a product line builder and latterly as a vendor and consultant. Isabel John of Fraunhofer IESE  has a very strong research background in Product Lines and Scoping and also a lot of practical consultancy work. Klaus Schmidt in his own words is a veteran of the product line scene with a very strong research and industry background initially at Fraunhofer IESE and latterly at the University of Hildesheim. Finally, Christa Swanniger gets involved in many product line activities at Siemens AG in her role in the central technology group.

Adding weight in the audience were people like the SEI’s Paul Clements, Sholom Cohen and Gary Chastek. Dave Weiss of Avaya Labs was also present and contributed some good insights from his lengthy experience. Perhaps depressingly there were no product managers in the audience – the key role for product line scoping.

We didn’t get through half the material we were hoping to get through – with Isabel in particular just ‘warming up’ – mainly due to the great number of questions and comments from the audience many of whom were working in existing product lines. Interestingly, many of these people claimed to be running product lines without doing any form of scoping. A handful did do scoping. Later it emerged that some of the people who didn’t do scoping actually did do it but either didn’t call it that or were not closely involved with the group doing scoping.

I’ve (hopefully) recorded the panel so will publish the recording later once I’ve got through my editing backlog.

My demo session Jump-Starting Software Product Lines with Clone Detection was based around using clone detection to help mine assets from existing software in order to act as a basis for a product line platform and to monitor the product line e.g. to ensure that application developers are not simply copying code from the platform into their applications and then modifying it or to look for new reuse opportunities in the code base where multiple applications include  the same code.

Of course the rationale for the demo was to showcase the features of the Axivion Bauhaus Suite in this area. As well as a tool demo I also described two case studies where Bauhaus had been applied to real product lines. In the first study around 160 functions in application code were identified as code clones – representing a good basis for an extended product line platform. In the second study Bauhaus was used to help monitor the product line and showed that although there was some opportunity for reuse that was being missed by the organisation they were in fact operating the product line very effectively.

I didn’t feel I ran the demo that well – maybe I relaxed a bit after the panel session had gone so well – but afterwards a few people did come up and say it was a nice demo and certainly there were very few Bauhaus flyers left afterwards so perhaps it went better than I thought. Anyway, I hope to record the demo for later videocast soon so keep an eye out for this if you’re interested.

Lots of familiar faces here so it looks like the rest of conference will be fun…