Integrating Product Line Engineering and Agile Methods : Flexible Design Up-front vs . Incremental Design

Today’s market expectations force organizations to invent and provide new products in short time and thus to speed up their product and software development. On the one hand, Product Line Engineering (PLE) is a promising approach that is believed to shorten time to market and increase high quality of products. On the other hand, agile methods aim at reducing time to market and increasing quality. However, different philosophies underlie PLE and agile methods. PLE requires flexible, up-front design to set-up a reference architecture for families of products. Agile methods propose a simple, incremental design that only designs for the product at hand. Nevertheless, combining PLE and agile methods is a must to further increase both time to market and quality of products. In this paper we present an approach how to combine PLE and agile methods. To better understand the effects of a combination of PLE and agile methods, we performed an experiment. We also investigate the Return on investment (ROI) of the activities related to PLE and agile methods.