A bibliometric analysis of 20 years of research on software product lines

Context: Software product line engineering has proven to be an efficient paradigm to developing families of similar software systems at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality.Objective: This paper analyzes the literature on product lines from 1995 to 2014, identifying the most influential publications, the most researched topics, and how the interest in those topics has evolved along the way.Method: Bibliographic data have been gathered from ISI Web of Science and Scopus. The data have been examined using two prominent bibliometric approaches: science mapping and performance analysis.Results: According to the study carried out, (i) software architecture was the initial motor of research in SPL; (ii) work on systematic software reuse has been essential for the development of the area; and (iii) feature modeling has been the most important topic for the last fifteen years, having the best evolution behavior in terms of number of published papers and received citations.Conclusion: Science mapping has been used to identify the main researched topics, the evolution of the interest in those topics and the relationships among topics. Performance analysis has been used to recognize the most influential papers, the journals and conferences that have published most papers, how numerous is the literature on product lines and what is its distribution over time.