Product Line Architectures for Global Software Development

This half-day tutorial discusses how product line practices can be applied to software projects with development teams distributed around the world. Software products are growing in complexity, and the development organizations that implement new features are growing in staff size. Business managers are seeking new approaches, such as offshoring and outsourcing, to get new software products to market quicker, while reducing their overall development investments. Siemens has been performing research to decompose large-scale requirements into a well-structured set of software components that can be developed in parallel among globally distributed development teams. This tutorial describes an approach using product line architecture methods for multi-site development projects in which software components are commissioned by a central product management and engineering organization for development at distributed sites.