Systems and Software Product Lines Overview

The New Frontier for Business Innovation

Systems and software product line (SPL) engineering approaches open new frontiers in innovation, economy of scale, competitive advantage and profitability – impacting the fundamentals of how you deliver products and compete with your product lines.

An Efficient Means of Production

The characteristic that distinguishes the SPL approach from previous efforts is when an organization invests in a means of production that enables the efficient creation of a product line of similar software systems from a common set of software assets. Manufacturers have long employed analogous engineering methods to create a product line of similar products using a common factory that assembles and configures parts designed to be reused across the product line.

A Shift in Perspective: Engineer Your Portfolio as a Single System

With product-centric development tools and methods, organizations must craft ad hoc, homegrown techniques for managing the “commonalities and variabilities” among products. The result is increasingly complex and labor-intensive interactions, interdependencies and coordination activities that impede a company’s ability to achieve strategic business objectives such as hitting marketplace windows, expanding the portfolio while maintaining product quality, and ultimately, maximizing profitability.

Organizations mired in the pain of product-centric engineering experience an “SPL epiphany” when a shift in perspective reveals a simpler solution to the problem. The powerful, though subtle, essence of the SPL epiphany is the focus on a single system for the means of production rather than a focus on the multitude of products.

By shifting to a single system approach, the complexity of managing product interdependencies is eliminated and replaced by automated production, enabling dramatic increases in the number of products that can be effectively created, deployed and maintained. As a result, the scope and scale of a product line can be based on business opportunities and profitability goals, rather than the complexity limitations imposed by product-centric development approaches.