The organization, coordination and supervision of the commonalities and variability in a (software) product line, including (the number of) variation points, variants and their dependencies to establish long-term reusable (software) product line assets allowing very large (software) product families with very complex behavior that can be efficiently extended, changed, customized, or configured for use in a particular context.

Bosch, J. (2013). Software Product Line Engineering. In R. Capilla, J. Bosch, & K.-C. Kang (Eds.), Systems and Software Variability Management SE - 1 (pp. 3–24). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [Springer DOI]