Social software product lines

Software product lines are an engineering paradigm meant to systematically configure software products of reusable assets so that development effort and time are minimized. Config-uring a high-quality product is a challenging design activity, main-ly because quality is a dynamic property and hardly predictable by designers at design time. In this position paper, we propose Social Software Product Lines (SSPL) as a new development paradigm which involves users as collaborators in judging software products quality and guiding configuration in a lifelong style. SSPL para-digm advocates two principles. The first is that quality has to be evaluated iteratively during the product operation so that quality evaluation is maintained up-to-date. The second is that users are the main evaluator of quality and their feedback is a primitive driver of reconfiguration. At runtime, SSPL keeps obtaining users’ quality feedback and planning upon reconfiguration to deliver the product shown most adequate by the users’ community. We discuss motivations and foundations of SSPL and outline a set of research directions.