Evolving a Mobile Learning Software Product Line for the Teaching of Programming through an Industry Practitioner Perspective

The process that unifies theoretical techniques from academia with the practical expertise from industry has been considered an interesting approach to software development, since it can increase quality, reduce costs and allow a high level of reuse. In this perspective, we have worked on the integration of industry practices with academic research for evolving a software product line (SPL) for the development of mobile applications in the context of the teaching of programming. The first version of the proposed SPL was evaluated in a previous study and, as a result, we noticed a lack of integration of practitioners in the performed evaluation. Thereby, this work aims at investigating if the expertise of software industry practitioners can somehow improve the SPL proposed and, additionally, identifying which strategies can be adopted to complement the academic theories. Based on this goal we discuss: (i) the evolution of the SPL conceptual architecture under an industry practitioners' perspective; (ii) the proposed improvements based on the industry professionals' point of view; (iii) the representation of the improved SPL architecture adopting an SPL modeling approach; and (iv) the adoption of software industry strategies in the SPL engineering sub-processes, based on quickly development process in small development companies.