A PLSE Environment in 80s - International Workshop on Adopting Product Line Software Engineering

Abstract

A PLSE environment in 80s Back in early days in 1980s, we had developed an integrated business application development environment called Zodiac (its project name). Although we didn’t think the system as a PLSE environment at that time, the environment had several interesting features that we might hope to include coming PLSE environments. For example, the system kept various application patterns inside written in a special pattern description language named Meta-skeleton. Designers and analysts were asked to input various parameters that Meta-skeletons needed to fulfill the end-user’s requirements. Using those parameters stored in a database, the system generated full set of source codes, JCLs and documents. The heart of the system as PLSE environment was Meta-skeletons since you could collect and settle domain knowledge as assets in the form of descriptions using the language. It took almost one year to collect and analyze the requirements from users. We had to analyze not only existing applications and documents, but also business/development process of the target packages either. Although the system had been used from early 80s to mid 90s extensively, it was discarded eventually since it didn’t catch up the modern PC architectures and operating environments like Windows.