Aligning product line business and technical strategies
Mike Mannion, Juha Erik Savolainen · 2013
In the consumer product market space a commercial challenge is to offer personalization of products and services for individual customers at a mass production price. One solution is the development of a software product line platform comprising a set of products that have similar functions, behaviours and properties but with sufficient variability to capture customer differences. However as a product line evolves, customer requirements change and new products are added to the product line, software producers realize the platform cannot be "stretched" indefinitely. The central problem is striking a balance between development efficiency through increasing platform commonality and customer dissatisfaction with products that have unwanted features/properties. The introduction of multiple product lines may be a better alternative. In practice, achieving the balance is a compromise between satisfying customers' requirements, minimising the costs of changes to the product line platform, and a vendor's mission, capability and capacity. This tutorial will explore the broader challenges of product line evolution but focus on platform management through describing techniques for mapping changing variability between product line requirements and a product line platform architecture, and describe the contexts for deploying multiple product lines as an alternative.