Since its rise to general awareness and popularity starting close to two decades ago, the concept of software product lines has taken the center stage in the software reuse community. After more than four decades of research into effective and efficient reuse of software inside the four walls of the organization, and countless initiatives, software product lines presented an approach that has proven to provide real productivity improvements in the development cost of software intensive products. This has allowed companies to increase their product portfolio with an order of magnitude, to allow for much higher degrees of configurability by customers, facilitated common look-and-feel across a wide product population and enabled companies to be more innovative by decreasing the cost of new product experiments. It achieved this by broadening the scope of study from technology to include process, business strategy and organizational aspects. Successful product lines address all aspects relevant to the organization and then adopt and institutionalize the approach in the company.
This special issue features eight papers from the 14th Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2010). SPLC provides an institution and the premier meeting place for the software product line community. In particular, SPLC 2010 was held in Jeju, South Korea, and the accepted papers covered various areas of software product line engineering including product line contexts, variability management, formal approaches, product validation, and feature modeling. We invited eight top quality papers and they were significantly improved and extended for this special issue.