Product Line Scoping for Healthcare Information Systems Using the ISO/IEC 26550 Reference Model

Resumen

The main goal of this work is to present a process for Software Product Lines (SPL) scoping focused on early consideration of software product quality. Product Line Scoping is the first phase of SPL Engineering (SPLE), in the Domain Engineering (DE) lifecycle, where the SPL long-term feasibility must be determined. The PLScoP process proposed here for SPL scoping, is an adaptation of the general PL Scoping phase defined in the new ISO/IEC 26550 standard describing a reference model or framework for SPLE, and it concerns three main stages, Portfolio Scoping, Domain Scoping and Asset Scoping. In this work, the complete PLScoP is outlined, but only the Domain Scoping phase will be detailed and applied. General guidelines on “What to do”, as the majority of standards offer, are defined in ISO/IEC 26550. Our PLScoP complements this framework by presenting the “How to do”, offering precise techniques and artefacts to be applied and constructed, and by considering early and systematically quality issues; this will allow reduction of the development effort in the subsequent DE phases, Domain Requirements Engineering and Domain Design, where the major effort is concentrated SPL development workload. The Domain Scoping step of PLScoP will be applied to the Healthcare Information Systems domain.