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Introduction

This site is devoted to the community of software engineers and managers interested in using software product line approaches to develop their software. The goal is to provide software developers, product managers and development managers with practical information on software product line issues, ranging from introductory concepts to advanced techniques.

Because this site serves the software engineering community, your input and participation is encouraged. If you have comments, questions, a success story, or a perspective on software product line practice that you would like to share, please e-mail us at feedback@softwareproductlines.com or visit the discussion board.

Prelude

Using software product line techniques, companies such as Nokia, HP, LSI Logic, Philips, and Cummins have improved time-to-market, engineering costs, portfolio size and defect rates by factors of 3 to 50. Software engineering improvements of this magnitude are rare in the four decades since high-level languages replaced assembly language programming and are large enough to impact the way the companies compete in their market space.

Like all pioneers, software product line pioneers endured formidable risks, effort, and uncertainty to reap these benefits. Fortunately information, technology, and techniques are now available so that all software development organizations can predictably gain the same benefits without undue cost, risk, and effort.

The source of the order-of-magnitude improvements from software product line techniques is strategic software reuse: consolidate commonality throughout the product line, strategically manage all product line variation, and aggressively eliminate all duplication of engineering effort. The fact that order-of-magnitude improvements are possible offers surprising insights into the level of inefficiency that we have come to accept as part of software product development.

Site Roadmap

Access chapters from the menu bar in the page heading. Access chapter sub-sections from the menu box in the left column of each chapter. To move sequentially through the site, simply click on the link at the bottom of each page. The chapter topics are:

• Introduction. Learn software product line concepts
• Getting Started. Your first steps on the path to software product lines
• Benefits. If you need to convince your boss and your boss's boss...
• Successes. Inspirational and insightful success stories
• Perspectives. Short topics from the experienced and the experts
• Resources. Books, web sites, tools, seminars, conferences, services, and more