The Evidential Assessment of Software Technologies (EAST) project is aimed at improving the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in software engineering in general and in software product line in particular by developing and empirically assessing various support mechanisms such as methods, techniques, and tools. This project focuses not only on designing and conducting empirical studies to gather evidence in support of or against a particular technology (i.e., method, tool, and technique), but also support the use and adoption of different empirical research methods. This project also supports other research projects to design and conduct industry-relevant basic and applied research aimed at disseminating empirically supported research results in terms of publications and establishing and maintaining close collaboration between practitioners and researchers throughout the entire research process.

This project involves:

1) Conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR)

• Empirically evaluate the use and value of SLR guidelines and;
• Identify the potential areas for enhancement and improvement of SLR as an important research methodology in EBSE.

2) Empirical Evaluation of Technologies Supporting Software Product Line Engineering

Over the years, several methods, techniques, and tools have been developed to support the different aspects of software product line engineering. However, there appears to be dearth of literature reporting high quality research for evaluating software product line technologies (e.g., variability management, product derivation tools). Increasing the availability of empirical evidence is expected to help researchers to assess current research and to identify the most promising areas of research. Practitioners can benefit by making informed decisions for selecting suitable technologies for their particular software development activities. Empirical research in SPLE can also highlights the challenge of extending the methods, so that large scale situations of product line engineering can be successfully and effectively analyzed. This initiative is aimed at systematically selecting, analyzing and reporting the literature reporting evaluation studies of software product lines engineering. Specifically, the main goals of this research thread are to:

• Develop a framework for evaluating the technologies for supporting software product line engineering.
• Gather and synthesize all the available literature report evaluation studies of variability management in software product line engineering.
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Project Team

Sarmad Ali Muhammad

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