Second International Software Product Lines Young Researchers Workshop, SPLYR 2005. Proceedings

Different to many other software engineering techniques, product-line engineering arose from practical experience in industry. But as with every successful technique product line-engineering can also be considered only a real standard approach when it is not only applied in practice but also widely researched and especially taught in academia. Practice and academia are the two sides of the same coin. While industry sets the requirements, academia prepares the practitioners of tomorrow. The peculiarity of the SPLYR workshop is that it is specifically addressed to young researchers, in particular Ph.D. students, having original ideas and initiatives in the product line field. The first SPLYR workshop was successfully held at SPLC 2004 in Boston, the second SPLYR workshop is now part of SPLC Europe 2005. Different from the standard procedure of most workshops, we have no blind peer reviews at SPLYR. Each student was assigned to the product line expert who reviewed the proposal and discussed pros and cons of the work with the student. We would like to thank Len Bass, Stuart Faulk, Stefania Gnesi and Robyn Lutz for reviewing the proposals and for the effort they spent. We selected four proposals for presentation at the workshop. The topics range from organizational issues to enterprise applications, variability management and evolution. For many of the students this is the first time to present their work to an international audience. The workshop aims at providing the right platform for this and for discussing the presented work among each other and with experts in the field. We hope that with this workshop each of the students will get valuable feedback for the further development of the work.