APPLIES: A framework for evaluAting organization's motivation and preparation for adopting product lines

Abstract

In the software industry, product Lines has emerged as an attractive approach to perform planned reuse. Nevertheless, a product line solution is not appropriate for all the cases and requires some conditions to be implemented successfully. The literature offers several contributions regarding the adoption of product lines. However, only a few of these support decision-makers for taking well-informed decisions in favor or against following this approach. This paper presents APPLIES, a framework to (i) detect signals that could motivate an organization to adopt a product line approach (ii) assess to what extent a company is prepared for supporting the practices necessary to adopt a product line. APPLIES is grounded in a thematic analysis of the literature and was preliminarily evaluated with two experts through a survey and an interview. The results of the evaluation provide us insights to create an improved version of the proposal following a design-science method.