Companies considering adopting a product line engineering approach should ideally analyze the pros and cons to determine the sound reasons for this decision. In order to support this analysis, in previous work we proposed the APPLIES evaluation framework. This framework provides information to evaluate the convenience of adopting a product line engineering approach.
This talk will present an empirical evaluation of APPLIES. This experience includes 18 potential practitioners that used the framework to evaluate the convenience of adopting product line engineering in 19 different companies. The collected evidence was used to evaluate the perceived usefulness, intention to use and ease of use of APPLIES. The results presented increase confidence that APPLIES is a useful tool, but also identify some possibilities for improvement.