Proceedings of Software Product Lines. Economics, Architectures, and Implications. Workshop 15 at 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

The deployment of product line engineering requires a profound understanding of domain engineering as an essential phase in a product line lifecycle. A domain engineering method defines domain activities which include: domain definition, domain analysis, derivation of generic domain architectures, identification of commonalties and variabilities in product families, and identification and specification of domain-wide software assets. To gain insight on how to do domain engineering in a product line context, we need to analyze and compare existing domain engineering methods using controlled experiments and case studies. This paper reports on a classroom experiment in which we analyze and compare a sampling of domain engineering methods. We discuss the details of the experiment and the lessons which we draw from it, then we discuss some preliminary conclusions about the experiment.