Product Line Strategies and Feature Reuse

Successful organizations working with software product lines evolve by ensuring they align their forecasts of market trends with their product line strategy. Without careful management of that alignment over time, the execution of a product line strategy becomes far less effective. This tutorial describes how business strategy choices affect product line strategy, which in turn impacts upon engineering decisions to make, buy or reuse features. It will present a feature development decision framework that guides the choice of make/buy/reuse, depending on the product line strategy and whether the feature is to be in some products or all. A discussion of the implementation of the reuse choice will follow by exploring two different approaches. The first approach is product configuration based on feature selection at feature variation points popular in modern software product line engineering. The second approach is drawn from the context of intelligent systems development and uses case-based reasoning. Both approaches have different properties and trade-offs about the costs of making software artefacts reusable and the benefits of reusing them.