One of the interesting challenges when you have a software product line is determining how best to market the solutions you provide. A SPL is neither a product nor is it completely custom code, and while it can be hugely beneficial to both the developing company and their clients, the marketing of such solutions is a bit of a tightrope.

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I've been getting more involved recently with the XP and test driven development lists. One thread that has come up is the appropriateness of unit and integration tests within a software product line. That lead to the following exchange which raises the question: "when does configuration become programming"?

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If you only build three or four applications a year and use a framework like Mach-II or Model-Glue with a 6-24 month release cycle, framework versioning is annoying, but not a major pain point. When you plan to generate 1,000+ custom applications a year using a framework with a monthly upgrade cycle, a different approach is required . . .

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In general terms, feature modelers are tools for describing and selecting variants of a software product line with known variability. To take a trivial example (and commercial feature modeling software is anything but trivial) you can select to have a store and a newsletter and set what properties of the store and newsletter to implement.

The question then is what happens when you want to go beyond the feature modeler and it raises some interesting design questions for anyone trying to create a highly flexible Software Product Line . . .

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