Barriers to the adoption of software product line engineering
Cagatay Catal · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2009
Software development costs and time to deploy a software-intensive system significantly decrease when Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) approach is applied. Numerous case stu-dies in industrial and military domains have shown that reliability, quality, productivity and user interface consistency improve drasti-cally in addition to the decrease of cost and time-to-market. Also, this system engineering approach is very effective in three market strategies known as cost leadership, differentiation, and focusing. Despite these measurable benefits, product line engineering adop-tion is slower than the other technological trends such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Model Driven Development (MDD), and Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD). In this pa-per, we investigate the barriers to the adoption of SPLE and ex-plore the root causes of them from three points of views: Project sponsor, organization, and SPLE community. We provide sugges-tions for how the industry and SPLE community can solve these multi-dimensional issues in a short term.