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Benefits of Software Product Lines
Chapter Author: Charles W. Krueger, PhD, CEO, BigLever Software
The benefits of the software product line approach come in the form of tactical improvements in software engineering -- deploying software products faster, cheaper, and better. However, what is most interesting is that these tactical improvements are often large enough to have an impact well beyond the borders of the engineering department, offering strategic competitive benefits to the way that a company conducts its business.
The following tactical engineering benefits can be gained from software product lines. Some organizations have reported improvements ranging from factors of 3 to factors of 50.
- reduction in the average time to create and deploy a new product
- reduction in the average number of defects per product
- reduction in the average engineering effort to deploy and maintain a product, and therefore reduction in the average engineering cost per product
- increase in the total number of products that can be effectively deployed and managed
These tactical engineering benefits translate into a very powerful set of strategic business benefits:
- reduced time-to-market and time-to-revenue for new products
- improved competitive product value
- higher profit margins
- improved ability to hit market windows
- better product quality and improved company reputation for quality
- improved scalability of business model in terms of products and markets
- increased agility to expand into new markets
- reduced risk in product deployments
The order-of-magnitude benefits offered by software product lines can be attributed to strategic software reuse. Software product line techniques explicitly consolidate and capitalize on commonality throughout the product line. They formally manage and control the variations among the products in the product line. They aggressively eliminate all duplication of effort in the engineering processes. As a result, the only unique engineering effort required for any product in the product line is for the product variations that are truly unique to the product.
The remaining sections in this chapter provide additional details and descriptions on the tactical and strategic benefits of software product lines.
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2nd Generation Tools and Methods for
Systems and Software Product Line Engineering |
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