Systematic management of software product lines

Software product lines can effectively facilitate large-scale reuse and can thus bring about order of magnitude improvements in terms of time to market (TTM), costs, and quality. This comes at the price of a more complex development environment in which many interdependencies are created through shared generic assets. Owing to this complexity, the specific strategy chosen for product line development can be expected to have a strong impact on the benefits that can be gained from product line development. This is systematically studied in this work, as we vary different strategies and apply them to various forms of products lines. On the basis of the analysis of the performed simulations, we were able to determine optimal, heuristic strategies to the integrated management of the product line. As a result of the analysis, we identify strategies and guidelines that can be employed by practitioners in order to improve the success of their management of a software product line. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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