Developing software for parallel architectures is a notoriously difficult task, compounded further by the range of available parallel architectures. There has been little research effort invested in how to engineer parallel applications for more general problem domains than the traditional numerically intensive domain. This thesis addresses these issues. An object-oriented paradigm for the development of general-purpose parallel applications, with full lifecycle support, is proposed and investigated, and a visual programming language to support that paradigm is developed. This thesis presents experiences and results from experiments with this new model for parallel application development.

This study proposes an industrialization model, Software Factory Automation, for establishing software product lines. Major contributions of this thesis are the conceptualization of Domain Specific Kits (DSKs) and a domain design model for software product lines based on DSKs. The concept of DSK has been inspired by the way other industries have been successfully realizing factory automation for decades. DSKs, as fundamental building blocks, have been deeply elaborated with their characteristic properties and with several examples. The constructed domain design model has two major activities: first, building the product line reference architecture using DSK abstraction / and second, constructing reusable asset model again based on DSK concept. Both activities depend on outputs of feature-oriented analysis of product line domain. The outcome of these coupled modeling activities is the reference architecture and asset model of the product line. The approach has been validated by constructing software product lines for two product families. The reusability of DSKs and software assets has also been discussed with examples. Finally, the constructed model has been evaluated in terms of quality improvements, and it has been compared with other software product line engineering approaches.