Rationale:
Software product families are used in industry to keep down the cost of developing similar products. However, the development of Software Product Families is still not well understood.
How do we create them, manage them, maintain them, and configure them? And what kind of requirements do they put on programming languages in terms of abstraction and composition mechanisms?
Last but not least, how do these two points of view - software engineering and language design - play together constructively?

Keywords:
Software product families; software engineering problems and solutions in connection with product families; and programming language challenges and requirements in relation to product families.

Description:
At the University of Aarhus, there is a long tradition for programming language design and research. Many efforts have been made in relation to improved abstraction and composition mechanisms. Moreover, the highly popular and active research community around aspect-orientation forms another source of inspiration in the area of abstraction and composition mechanisms.
Lund University has created a strong research group within Software Configuration Management (SCM). Much work has been done is researching how SCM can be (and is) used to support various development methods - in particular for aspects of team collaboration and co-ordination. Through the Lucas research project, the group has good contacts to industry for exchange of best practices and current problem issues.
Neither of these two approaches above seems to able to solve all problems of developing Software Product Families on their own.
Therefore, we envision that bringing together software engineering and language design will be a refreshing challenge for both communities, posing new problems and generating new ideas about how to solve them.

Form:
The format of this subworkshop will be a structured discussion around 2-3 topics. For each topic we will invite one or two short presentations to kick off a general discussion.

Programme:
Wednesday August 18 (14.00-18.00): Software Product Families