Becoming Agile while preserving software product lines: an Agile transformation model for large companies

Software process improvement has always been an essential part of software projects. Current market trends and the rapid pace of changing requirements demand fast development and adaptability. Agile software development is a popular possibility to react on these trends. Implementing agile practices promises for example a shorter time-to-market, satisfied customers and increased software quality. Consequently many companies strive for an integration of agile methods or for an agile transformation. High-technological environments such as the automotive domain also want to benefit from the advantages promised by agile software development. Even more than smaller companies, these large ones have to deal with software systems getting more and more complex. One established solution facing this problem is an effective and managed way to reuse software at least partially. Software product lines provide an efficient way to manage software reuse and to handle the high complexity. Consequently, they are widely distributed in large and high-technological environments. In most companies in the automotive domain, software product lines are already present and agile development methods should be introduced. Hence, there is a need for a transformation model preserving the benefits of software product lines. We conducted a literature review to achieve an overview and a better understanding of agile transformation models in large companies. In total, we analyzed 367 papers. None of them addresses the agile transformation in large companies with existing software product lines. In consideration of this research gap, we propose a transformation model preserving the benefits of already existing models and extending aspects which are important for existing software product lines.