Comprehension and utilization of core assets models in software product line engineering

In software product line engineering, core assets are reusable artifacts that are intended to be used by a family of software products in order to improve development productivity and quality of particular software products. In order to support the construction and maintenance of core assets, various modeling methods have been proposed. However, the assessment of these methods is still in an incubation stage. In fact, only several frameworks for comparing and evaluating these methods have been suggested. These mainly refer to lists of criteria whose examination is sometimes subjective and opinion-dependent. In this paper, we call for empirical evaluation of the comprehension and utilization of core assets and report the initial results of a series of studies we performed in this context.