Product line software engineering (PLSE) has been recognized as a key software development paradigm for meeting diverse needs of the global market efficiently and effectively giving competitive advantages to IT industries and embedded systems developers. The Product Line Engineering Program of SEI (www.sei.cmu.edu) and a series of Esprit and ITEA projects of EU sparked researches and technology transfer efforts in this area since early 90s.

The PLSE paradigm has been changing the way software developers think about software development: from the single application view to the application family, i.e., product line, view. Several software engineering concepts and techniques have been developed to support the product line engineering, including commonality and variability analysis, variation points and variants, variability management, and generative programming. As the PLSE paradigm has been applied to large scale domains such as automobile and mobile communications, the ability to manage variability effectively has been recognized as a key success factor. In my talk, I will give an overview the evolution of reuse concepts, discuss various dimensions of variability management, give a brief introduction of the method that I have been working on, and discuss research issues.

Dr. KyoChul Kang received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982. Since then he worked as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and as a member of technical staff at Bell Communications Research and AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University as a senior member in 1987. From 1992 until 2013, he was a professor at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). He is currently an advisor (Executive Vice President) at Samsung Electronics. He served as General Chair for the 8th International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR) held in Madrid, Spain in 2004, General Chair for the 11th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC2007) held in Kyoto, Japan in September 2007, and also for the 14th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC2010) held in Jeju, Korea in September 2010.

While at the University of Michigan, he was involved in the development of PSL/PSA, a requirement engineering tool system, and a Meta modeling technique. Since then his research has focused on software reuse and software product line engineering. His recent research includes software reuse, product line engineering, requirements engineering, and computer-aided software engineering.