Combining service orientation with product-line engineering

Software product line engineering is a paradigm of software reuse, which aims at developing a family of products with reduced time-to-market and improved quality. Recently, research themes that address development issues for reusable and dynamically reconfigurable core assets have emerged and a service-oriented product line (SOPL), whose products are built upon services and service-oriented architecture is one of them. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that need to be addressed in order to develop effective SOPLs: 1) the different notion of first-class objects as engineering drivers (i.e., feature vs. service), 2) the dynamic characteristics of service-orientation, 3) the involvement of third party service providers, and 4) the variation (i.e., product configuration) control of SOPLs. We also briefly describe a QoS-aware framework that provides automated runtime support for service discovery, negotiation, monitoring and service provider rating, as one of solutions.