focus initiating software product lines SEI’s Software Product.pdf

initiating software product lines focus SEI’s Software Product Line Tenets Linda M. Northrop, Software Engineering Institute ompanies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, and Motorola, are finding that using a product line approach for software can yield Cremarkable quantitative improvements in productivity, time to market, product quality, and customer satisfaction. This practice of building sets of related systems from common assets can also efficiently satisfy the current demand for mass customization of software. Product Software product lines are, of course, not new in manufacturing. Boeing, Ford, Dell, and even lines are rapidly emerging as a viable McDonald’s develop product lines. But soft- mon, managed feature set satisfying a par- and important ware product lines are a relatively new con- ticular market segment’s specific needs or software cept. They are rapidly emerging as a practi- mission and that are developed from a com- development cal and important software development mon set of core assets in a prescribed way. paradigm. The paradigm. A product line succeeds because Core assets form the basis for the software Software companies can exploit their software prod- product line. Core assets often include, but ucts’ commonalities to achieve economies of are not limited to, the architecture, reusable Engineering Institute production. softwa