First International Software Product Lines Young Researchers Workshop, SPLYR 2004. Proceedings

In the past years product-line engineering has emerged as the standard practice in industry for large-scale software reuse. Different to many other 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. Though this is the first SPLYR workshop, we had submissions from students from all over the world, including South Africa, Europe, and the Unites States. Each student was assigned one 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, Jan Bosch, André van der Hoek, and Dirk Muthig for reviewing the proposals and for the effort they spent in discussing the work with the students. We selected seven proposals for presentation at the workshop. The topics range from product line adoption over variability management and product line architectures to product line 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.