Towards a Pricing Method for Software Product Lines.
Johannes Müller · MKWI · 2010
Software product lines (spls) are an emerging paradigm, which can help to increase the efficiency of software development, thereby, decrease the development costs for a single system within a given domain. That is achieved by exploiting similarities between systems of a whole family of systems while managing their variability in a systematic manner. The orientation towards spls is a strategical decision, which affects the whole organization. This is because the setup of an spl needs initially an high investment. Afterwards, the effort to build a system out of the spl is significantly smaller compared to a single system development (cf. fig. 1). Hence, a number of systems needs to be build – and of course sold – out of the spl until the break even point, the point where an investment generates positive profit, is reached (cf. fig. 1). The profit (Π) is defined as the difference between revenue (R) and cost (C)