Software Product Line in the Real World

Dear Colleagues,

We cordially invite you to submit your papers for the Special Issue entitled “Software Product Line in the Real World” of Applied Sciences.

Software product line engineering (SPLE) has been adopted across the industry, and its benefits on time-to-market, costs, and quality have been demonstrated in an innumerable number of cases. Organizations in the domains that engineer software-intensive products such as medical, aerospace,  telecommunication, business, e-commerce, automotive, consumer electronics, manufacturing, computer systems, and so on, have benefited from applying SPLE. In the past, many organizations shared their obstacles and challenges in applying SPLE and practitioners and researchers developed and reported specific methods, tools and processes to overcome them, which greatly helped advance the SPLE technology and promote its industry-wide adoption. Recently, many believe, the world has entered a new age called the 4th Industrial Revolution, which is characterized by new ICT technologies, among many new innovative technologies of various fields, such as artificial intelligence technology, big data technology, the Internet of things technology, cloud technology and mobile technology, and so on, for the application domains of environmental and agricultural infrastructure, healthcare, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, and so on. However, it appears that specific methods, tools, processes and experience-based knowledge of SPLE for the technologies of this new era and the synthesized uses of them have not been sufficiently shared in spite that more than a decade has passed since its beginning. Accordingly, we seek contributions from the practitioners and researchers in industry and academia on the practices and theories applied to engineering SPLs in the real world in this new context.

The topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following in industrial applications of SPLE across all lifecycle stages of SPLE:

• Organizational and business aspects;
• Adopting or migrating to product-line engineering;
• Scoping of product portfolios;
• Architecture, design, and implementation of product lines;
• Quality and non-functional properties;
• Product line testing, verification, and validation;
• Process aspects;
• Variability management across all lifecycle stages;
• Comparison and assessment of tools in the industry;
• Version and configuration management;
• Any theory, practice, methods, or techniques used in the industry.

Prof. Sungwon Kang
Dr. Jihyun Lee
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.