ABSTRACT

Implementing variability-intensive system is now a common solution for organisations to respond to the dynamic software requirements. Among different approaches, software product line engineering is an example that allows flexibility to support variable software products. The key factor that drives the success in software product line development is the sufficient management on commonality and variability. In order to maintain the sustainability of the product line to ensure organisations’ profitability and productivity, there is a need to evaluate the optimality of different sets of features taking technical debt into account. This chapter provides a systematic approach to assess the optimality of different feature sets that could form a product; modern portfolio theory is used to model these portfolios and to quantify the technical debt associated with each portfolio. A case study is adopted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. The result shows that the method is able to help organisations’ decision-making on the commonality and variability with the concern of technical debt, which was not addressed by the previous studies.