Paul Clements

Managing Variation: An Industrial Perspective on Product Line Engineering If nothing endures but change, then to make the products of our labor enduring, we must build them to accommodate change. If they cannot, they will be cast aside. Change can be thought of as occupying a time window: A solution needs to do something different a year from now, and then something different from that six months later, and so forth. An extremely interesting special case is when that time window shrinks to zero: Our solution needs to do and be a dozen different things right now. In many sectors, that special case turns out to be, in fact, the most common case. The so-called general case, where a single solution evolves over time, turns out to be a less interesting special case. This talk will explore the foundations for the field of product line engineering, which is the engineering of a family of systems that are similar but vary from each other. We will explore various techniques for handling this need, from the earliest to the most up to date, and show how the approaches transcend just software but apply across all engineering disciplines and all levels of an enterprise. Finally, we relate how this concept is being applied in industry today, and show where it is saving companies tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Dr. Paul Clements is the Vice President of Customer Success at BigLever Software, Inc., where he works to spread the industrial adoption of systems and product line engineering. Prior to this, he was a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, where for 17 years he worked leading or co-leading projects in product line engineering and software architecture documentation and analysis. Prior to the SEI, he was a computer scientist with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D. C.
Clements is the co-author of three practitioner-oriented books about software architecture: "Software Architecture in Practice” (three editions), "Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies," and "Documenting Software Architectures: View and Beyond” (two editions). He also co-wrote "Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns,” and was co-author and editor of "Constructing Superior Software" (1999). He has also authored dozens of papers in software and systems engineering reflecting his long-standing interest in the design and specification of challenging system solutions. He was a founding member of the IFIP WG2.10 Working Group on Software Architecture.