Recent Experiences with Software Product Lines in the US Department of Defense

Since 1998, the Software Engineering Institute has held a series of annual software product line workshops with participants from the US Department of Defense (DoD) community. Over the years, the emphasis in the workshops has shifted from asking, "How can we do software product lines?" to sharing, "This is how we are doing software product lines." Both defense acquisition offices and their suppliers reported particularly impressive results in the 2010 workshop. This paper summarizes these recent workshop results, including descriptions of DoD product line efforts, implementation issues, and lessons learned.