Development of a PLE Factory Environment with GitLab Integration and following ISO/IEC 26580

Abstract

[Abstract]: Product Line Engineering (PLE) is a strategic approach in software engineering. Existing PLE factory development environments often lack integration with modern development and version control platforms, limiting their efficiency. We present a PLE factory development environment that meets the ISO/IEC 26580 standard and integrates with GitLab and git repositories to manage feature catalogues, bill-of-features portfolios, shared assets, and product instances. Our tool uses the Universal Variability Language (UVL) for feature modeling, offering a feature model editor for domain analysis and a source code editor for domain implementation. For application engineering, it supports requirements analysis via a bill-of-features editor and product derivation using the spl-js-engine. The tool also defines a git branching model to automate product asset changes and includes real-time tracking and historical visualization of the derivation process for each product configuration. A demonstration of the tool is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12700667.