Productivity and Cost Benefits of Software Product Lines

Software product line techniques can significantly increase the productivity of software engineers, seen as a reduction in the effort and cost required to develop, deploy, and maintain a collection of similar software products. Typical productivity improvements reported in case studies range between a factor of 2 to 3, though higher factors are not uncommon. Because the labor costs often dominate the cost of building software systems, productivity and cost benefits go hand-in-hand with software product lines.

The following graph illustrates the effort – and thus cost – required to develop, deploy, and maintain a collection of similar software products. The greater the total number of products, the greater the total effort and cost. The red line represents a conventional productivity line. The blue line represents a productivity line of the pioneering efforts in software product lines, where a significant up-front effort was typically required (seen as the high Y-axis intercept) to launch a software product line and to achieve the 3-to-1 productivity improvements (seen as the more gradual slope). The green line represents the new generation of software product line methods that can achieve 3-to-1 or better productivity gains with much less up-front effort.

The productivity and cost benefits of software product lines can be directly attributed to the very effective reuse of software – capitalizing on the commonality and efficiently managing the variation among products in the product line.

While productivity improves the bottom line in a company's finances, there are also strategic top line benefits. For example, productivity benefits can simultaneously lower the prices and increase the profit margins for products, which provides significant strategic competitive advantage. Furthermore, the large increases in productivity can counteract the pressures to export software development jobs to cheaper offshore development locations.