There are several definitions of Software product lines(SPL) or Software Product Lines Engineering (SPLE):

  1. SPL is a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the spesific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way. (Clements,P.,and Northrop,L.2002.Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns.Boston:Addison-Wesley)
  2. SPLE is an emerging software engineering paradigm, which guides organizations toward the development of products from core assets rather than the development of products one by one from scratch. (Kwanwoo Lee.,Kyo C.Kang.,and Jaejoon Lee.2002.Concepts and Guidelines of Feature Modelling for Product Line Software Engineering.Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg)

What Software Product Lines Are Not?.
When we speak of software product lines, we don’t mean any of the following:

  • Furtuitous Small-Grained Reuse
  • Single-System Development with Reuse
  • Just Component-Based Development
  • Just a Reconfigurable Architecture
  • Releases and Versions of Single Products
  • Just a set of Technical Standards

Essential Product Line Activities are :

  1. Core Asset Development
  2. Product Development
  3. Management

For more information, this is a good link

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