Using Documentation for Product Line Scoping

Product line scoping is the process of determining which of an organization's products, features, and domains would find systematic reuse economically useful. Scoping is generally the first phase in product line engineering. For a decade, it has been recognized as its own discipline in product line engineering. Scoping, also called product line planning, is based on expert knowledge and information; in meetings and workshops, individuals must interactively elicit information on the features, products, and further plans in the expert's product line domain. But often, these domain experts don't have the time to really reproduce and formulate all the knowledge needed for scoping. They should be heavily integrated into the scoping knowledge elicitation process, but they're only minimally available. The CAVE (Commonality and Variability Extraction) approach and its industrial applications offer a solution to the problem of domain experts' availability. CAVE supports scoping and product line engineering in a development organization by systematically eliciting the needed information from user documentation of existing systems. This article describes the approach and its embedding in scoping, as well as results and lessons learned from three industrial applications of the approach.