Product Line (PL) Engineering has become a major topic in industrial software engineering. It focuses on the development of complete system families as opposed to single systems. PL engineering aims at efficient and cost-effective development through large-scale reuse by exploiting the family members' commonalities and by controlling their variabilities.

The technical foundation for family-based development techniques has been studied for quite some time now. The focus until now has been on the down-stream, implementation-related activities such as architecting or flexible implementation technologies. However, in order to be successful these implementation activities need to be performed in an organizational and technical framework that is appropriately prepared to support them. This raises organizational issues, issues of PL planning, as well as issues concerning requirements modeling and management in the context of product lines. These more up-stream activities have not yet seen as much attention. In this workshop we focus on these early steps in PL engineering in particular.