Special section on the 17th International Software Product Line Conference

Today, companies develop, maintain and deploy families of similar software products (e.g., games for different models of smartphones) rather than a single product. Software product lines engineering refers to software engineering methods, tools and techniques for creating a collection of similar software systems from a shared set of software assets using a common means of production. Software Product Line Conferences started in 1996, as the premier forum for practitioners, researchers and educators to present and discuss the most recent ideas, innovations, trends, experiences, and concerns in the area of software product lines, software product family engineering and, more recently, systems family engineering, managing families of software products as a whole rather than each family member individually. This special section stems from the 17th SPL Conference held in Tokyo, Japan, in August 2013. The contributions to this special section are further elaborations of the papers presented at the conference.