Social Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software product lines are an engineering paradigm to systematically configure software products from reusable assets so that development effort and time are minimized. Configuring a high quality product is challenging, because quality is a dynamic property and can be difficult to determine at design time. In this paper, we propose Social Software Product Lines paradigm (SSPL) which exploits users' perception in judging products quality and guiding the configuration process at runtime. The SSPL paradigm advocates two principles. First, quality has to be evaluated iteratively during the product operation so that quality evaluation is kept up-to-date. Second, users are the primary evaluators of quality and their feedback is a primitive driver of configuration. At runtime, SSPL obtains users' quality feedback and reconfigures repeatedly in order to deliver the product found to be most adequate by the users' community. We discuss motivation and foundations of SSPL, and outline a set of research challenges.