Aligning Business and Technical Strategies for Software Product Lines

A successful software product line strategy has business goals, a business strategy, a target market and a technical strategy that is aligned with the business goals and the target market. A common challenge in a number of organizations is for business and engineering units to understand what business and technical strategy alignment actually means in practice and to maintain that alignment as business goals and target markets evolve. If they are misaligned, then at best significant development inefficiencies occur, and at worst there is loss of market share. This paper explains different business and technical strategies, describes commonly used engineering techniques to manage commonality and variability and their deployment under different strategies.