Product-line architectures
Martin Griss · 2001
You can manage a set of products as a group, planning the whole set consistently, allocating funding and developers to several of the products at the same time and advertising the products as a set, highlighting their common and varying features. This commonality and variability can be also exploited during development by treating the set of products as a family and decomposing the software into shared, reusable components that separate concerns (Parnas 1976, 1979). For example, at Hewlett-Packard, several families of LaserLet printers are developed, managed and sold as product lines. Different models (color or black and white, personal or business, large or small) provide different capabilities, and product numbers , features and web-pages (www.hp.com) are arranged to make comparisons of commonalties and differences easy. In many cases, several members of each product line share some common hardware, firmware and software components, but also differ in other components. For example, larger color LaserJets have complex paper handling systems, while smaller printers do not.