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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a pragmatic approach to components off‐the‐shelf (COTS)‐based development. Software product line (SPL) is at the forefront among the techniques for reducing costs, decreasing schedule time, and ensuring commonality of features across a family of products – as COTS are reused in multiple products.

A disciplined process for SPL development is still needed. This paper proposes the Y‐model for COTS‐based SPL development. The model put forward identifies and elaborates the essential phases and activities of SPL development from COTS‐based repository.

The Y‐model provides an efficient way of integrating the approaches of SPL and COTS‐based development as a cohesive software development model.

The model has the potential to tremendously increase software engineers' productivity. Thus, software architects, domain engineers and component designers should become aware of how to use these ideas to structure their models and designs.

This paper describes a systematic approach for COTS‐based development that takes into account the cataloguing and retrieval of software assets permeating a process that encompasses all stages of software development, from system product requirements engineering to system deployment.

The main purpose of this paper is to improve a web content management system (WCMS) product line for future implementations by identifying software commonalities in WCMS‐based web applications. WCMS plays a central role in modern web application development: most large public and internal web sites are based on a WCMS foundation. If we can improve the implementation process, the effectiveness and efficiency of web application development will increase significantly.

This research identifies reusable solutions from existing WCMS implementations using problem diagrams and structured goal modeling. From configurations were matched with atomic e‐business models by linking them to the strategic competencies through bottom‐up goal modeling. A designed method was constructed on how requirements can be elicited for WCMS implementations using goal modeling and problem frames.

The resulting method provides insight in relevant e‐business models and their relation to software product lines. Moreover, the approach is applied in a WCMS study which demonstrates its applicability.

The practical implications of this research is twofold: WCMS developers now have a method to improve their product line based on e‐business models; and requirements engineers implementing WCMS can use this model to apply reusable software and prioritize requirements. Both will potentially have a large impact on the effectiveness of implementations since most web applications are developed with WCMS.

The paper presents a novel approach for efficient and effective identification of software commonalities. This research is part of the web engineering method that focuses on development of web applications based on WCMSs.

A software product line (SPL) captures commonalities and variations (C&V) within a family of systems. Although, feature‐oriented approaches have been proposed for building product lines, none of them provide a systematic approach for identifying features. This paper proposes a domain analysis method for creating SPL based on scenarios, goals and features. In particular, the paper presents a domain requirements model (DRM) that integrates features with goals and scenarios, and a domain requirements modeling method that uses the DRM. This approach has been applied to the home integration system (HIS) domain to demonstrate its feasibility. This approach makes it possible to systematically identify features and provide the rationale for both features and C&V.

This paper aims to discuss the motivation and present the evolution from a Software Product Line (SPL) in the e-Gov Web (e-Gov Web SPL) domain to a SPL in the mobile domain (e-Gov Mobile SPL).

The evolution was supported by the Product Line UML-Based Software Engineering approach and the feature model.

The authors were able to observe that it is feasible to evolve from a SPL for the Web platform to a SPL for the mobile platform, with the intent to port existing Web applications to mobile platforms such that users can have access to the main information and are able to interact with the most important functionalities of Web applications in a mobile device.

As for the main limitations, the authors can point out the small number of instantiations performed until the moment with the support of the e-Gov Mobile SPL, what prevented the conduction of an empirical study.

Using e-Gov Mobile SPL, it is possible to reduce development time and cost.

The existing SPLs do not worry about supporting the development of mobile applications corresponding to existing Web applications, as it is desirable to have access to the information and main features of these applications in mobile devices. We obtained some e-Gov Mobile SPL instantiations corresponding to e-Gov Web SPL instantiations to attend the demands of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation Unit situated at Campo Grande, MS, Brazil.

The software industry, especially software development (SD), in Estonia is at the present moment in the phase of expansion: first level of life cycle of the industry. Initial maturity level of the industry is among other factors characterized by lower maturity level of development process in companies/development teams. The goal of this paper is to analyze the maturity level of SD process in Estonian companies. Usually, poorly managed processes and low‐development performance are the major reasons for overrun deadlines and insufficient competitive advantages. Therefore, improved performance is the key factor of SD industry competitiveness.

The methodology used in the paper is semi‐structured interviews with experienced software developers/project managers in Estonian SD enterprises. On the basis of the interviews, authors were analyzing the usability of capability maturity model integration (CMMI) in Estonian SD companies to perform/apply the software process improvement (SPI).

Results based on self‐evaluation are describing the current level of SD process maturity in sense of CMMI in Estonian SD enterprises. Also, the difficulties of collecting process performance data were discovered. SD companies did not find it necessary to collect and save development process performance data, such as number of (corrected) errors, number of lines of code, etc.

The paper describes structured performance as SD process maturity in sense of CMMI together with development process performance as project characteristics: product quality, cycle‐time, development effort, product maintainability, etc.

This paper proposes solutions to problems related to the maintenance and update of already existing e‐learning courseware.

A structured approach in form of a reference model for the re‐engineering of existing educational material is presented. In this context, concepts already established in the area of aspect‐oriented programming are applied to deal with crosscutting concerns in e‐learning material. Finally, a software product line approach is proposed for the creation of new courseware using re‐engineered components.

It turns out that some aspects of the methodology developed for aspect‐oriented programming can also be used to restructure the existing e‐learning material in such a way that maintenance is eased and redundancy is significantly reduced. In addition, software product lines for e‐learning material provide a global framework for coordinating the re‐engineering and reuse of components.

The advantage of the proposed approach is that existing e‐learning standards and systems do not have to be modified or adapted.

Usually, courseware evolves during a longer period of time and its development does not start every time from zero. There is a high incentive for re‐engineering of existing courseware, since it constitutes in many cases the competitive advantage of companies or universities. However, up to now, little attention is paid to the maintenance and the efficient update of e‐learning material which is already there.

The purpose of this paper is to present the proposal of a Product Line (PL)-based approach for Business Process Management (BPM) projects that cover the entire BPM lifecycle and proposes integrating it with dynamic techniques still not used together.

The authors carried out this work using the design science research methodology. The authors assessed the proposed approach using a classification procedure created through a series of specific attributes, which enables a comparison of the proposed integrated approach with related works selected from a systematic literature review.

The comparative assessment has shown that the proposed approach presents the most comprehensive solution than any other similar one suggested for the same purpose, mainly in terms of the coverage of the entire BPM lifecycle and dynamic techniques.

Due to the high-level conceptual nature of the proposed approach, the authors could not evaluate it also in terms of some controlled experiment or a case study.

The proposed approach aims at improving the management of business processes in organizations in a systematic way using concepts and techniques that exist in other areas, but not widely used together yet, such as BPM, service-oriented computing, and Software PL.

To propose and develop a cost‐effective approach to developing and implementing customized electronic business solutions in a do‐it‐yourself (DIY) fashion.

The proposed DIY approach is based on the concept of “portalets” that are used as building blocks to develop e‐business solutions with little or varying degree of customization efforts. Portalets form a platform for deriving the software (e‐business) product lines.

This paper not only discusses the necessity but also demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed DIY e‐business approach. New challenges associated with the approach are highlighted.

It is a critical and incremental task to develop portalets building blocks and identify their interfaces and standardize their customization points in terms of backend, middleware and client components.

The study identifies a suite of tools and techniques for building and implementing EBS in order for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to significantly reduce the time and effort to an affordable level while capturing the unique business logics into the solutions.

The DIY e‐business approach represents a unique alternative for SME companies to adopt and implement EBS to best suit their operational characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the role of the bottlenecks in the dynamic software development supply chains. The paper examines the effects of the task priorities in the software development and investigates the possible strategies to manage them effectively.

In this paper, a software development supply chain has been simulated. This includes modeling of the various sizes of software requirement, different priorities, variations in development times, quality defects, etc. The model assumes a fixed set of resources of various skills. The model is studied for the bottlenecks, throughput, work in progress (WIP), etc. under various work preemption scenarios.

The results indicate that job priorities impact the bottleneck formulation, throughput and WIP of the software development. The work interruption policies to accommodate priority jobs adversely impact the throughput. Selective introduction of interruptions by leaving the bottlenecks from interruptions helps balancing the throughput and priorities.

The impact of the learning curve and knowledge acquisition time needed by the resources to restart the interrupted work has not been considered in this paper, which can be a future area of research.

The paper helps the practicing managers evaluate the dynamics of the bottlenecks with various task management approaches and comprehend the possible tradeoffs between priority and throughout.

The paper looks at software development from a perspective of workflow dynamics. This is a pioneer effort, as it utilizes simulation and modeling approach in understanding the software supply chains better.

The goal of this paper is to present a roadmap for real estate operating companies (REOCs) to transform themselves into tech-centric enterprises.

This qualitative approach is based on the impact of technology on physical real estate assets and organisational structures as reviewed in industry and academic literature, professional experience and current property technology (PropTech) applications.

New technologies are rapidly changing how investors, tenants and managers use, invest and finance property. The revolutionary change for the industry will be in its organisational and industry structure, away from the traditional hierarchical-mechanistic form to a virtual open-agile-innovative organisational form.

Research limitations come from the lack of real estate companies utilising the hybrid flipped form of organisational structures.

Due to the current state of the economy, effects of the pandemic and rapid adoption of new technologies, real estate companies are likely to radically change the way they are organised, how they add value, innovate and their leadership/management style.

The revolution in real estate technologisation will not come from the application of these technologies but the rapid change in ideological thought and management leadership style and culture.

The introduction of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), blockchain, virtual reality, tablets, cell phones, applications, 5G, etc. is putting pressure on real estate organisations to change. These changes are long overdue and the future, modern real estate company will take a hybrid PropTech form – a company focussed on delivering high-quality products and services to its clients in real time.