Review By: Stuart Margach
05/11/2006"Designing Software Product Lines with UML" emphasizes using individual components as building blocks to analyze and design single-software systems. Author Hassan Gomaa approaches families of software systems as a pluralistic model that takes advantage of reusing common functionality, architecture, and other shared aspects for economy of scale with software development.

In his overview, the author focuses on functional requirements across common features in the software family, desired features, and viable alternatives. This is useful, as some requirements will apply to a few products to devise a system.

Gomaa works from elemental concepts to define relevant aspects of product software lines, software reuse, and application engineering in order to create a working foundation for a product line. Chapter one discusses the basic frameworks that share common features. This chapter also emphasizes the advantages of system component reuse and presents modeling techniques derived from UML for software design.

By emulating the production line theme typical to manufacturing industries, software product line development has earned recognition and stature within appropriate development circles. Developers can address specialized or unique needs of customers by combining commonality in features and functional components--including the option for tailor-made applications. It is possible to take advantage of speed to market, economies of scale in production costs, and operational performance by employing the product line approach described in this book. Developers, students, and practitioners in the software industry can leverage the most current UML techniques and tools to harness the capabilities engendered within reuse of components, code, and design principles.

This book provides benchmark sample cases to best explain crucial methods of product lines. One key method is the PLUS (Product Line UML-based Software engineering) model that can be used as an accelerant for supplementing UML design capabilities beyond the reach of single-system development. Bearing in mind the exemplary standards and benefits denoted by the PLUS method, Gomaa explores the associated aspects of modeling, such as the use case and a number of diagrammatic methods that cater to product-line development. There is also a wealth of information on different pattern-based approaches to show how it is possible to generate reusable architectural platforms for many application combinations and types.

The objective of designing product lines is directed toward reusing requirements to code. While this objective was eagerly sought during early software development, it has only recently gained credibility. It is now possible to utilize the tools and techniques refined through iterative versions of the UML language--combined with superior modeling techniques--to achieve economies of scale from a commercial perspective and qualitative improvements in software design and development.
This book is a reliable and useful reference manual, complemented by practical case studies for software developers, students, and technical experts in the field. It shows us how product-line capabilities, when combined with the essential utility of the UML language, can enhance software application design and implementation into an exciting and promising realm.