Our paper "Flexible Product Line Engineering with a Virtual Platform" has been accepted for publication at ICSE'14 New Ideas and Emerging Research (NIER) track

UPDATE: the preprint of the paper is now available.

In the paper, we propose an approach to achieving the benefits traditionally associated with an integrated platform, while retaining the benefits of cloning and without requiring the high-risk migration. Instead of physically integrating the assets, they should be distributed across projects, but remain reusable thanks to the metadata about them. The distributed assets together with the meta-data form a virtual platform, which provides the same functionality as the integrated platform, but aims at greatly reducing the risk of adoption of PLE as compared to starting with ad-hoc cloning.