Comparing Products using Similarity Matching

Software product lines can generate significant cost-efficiencies but managing their evolution is becoming more difficult. There are several reasons. The volume, variety and velocity of products is increasing particularly as customers demand personalized products. The corporate memory about the product line's history and development recedes as the personnel that manage and develop the product line ebb and flow from the organization. The economic, environmental, regulatory and social contexts into which the products were launched also continues to evolve. A significant challenge of the management task is product comparison. Product comparison is important for gauging whether (i) to build a new product or not (ii) a product aligns with the corporate brand (iii) a product falls within legislative and regulatory boundaries (iv) a product line platform needs to be reorganized. Product comparison can be of value during product-line scoping, domain engineering and application engineering. We will discuss two different approaches to address this challenge. One is grounded in feature modelling, the other in case-based reasoning.