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Quality Benefits of Software Product Lines
Quality benefits of software product lines can be measured in two ways. The first is how well each product matches the needs of each customer. The mass customization capabilities of software product lines directly address this measure of quality. The second is the rate of defects found in each of the products in the product line, which can also be significantly improved by software product line techniques. Companies have reported reductions in defect rates as high as 96% (see the HP success story).
Higher product quality with software product lines has both strategic business and tactical engineering impact:
- satisfied customers provide a continuing revenue stream and provide positive recommendations to other potential customers
- fewer product defects means lower overhead throughout the software lifecycle
- fewer support calls and thus a smaller support organization
- fewer failure/find/fix/retest cycles in the test organization leads to shorter test cycles and smaller test teams
- fewer debug/fix activities means that developers can focus more time on developing new products and new product capabilities
The quality benefits - in terms of defect reduction - can be directly attributed to the commonality in a software product line. By optimizing the reuse of software assets across the product line and throughout the life of a product line, very high quality assets emerge. Finding and fixing a single defect in a common software asset will impact all of the products using that asset, even if the defect was only observed in one of the products.
The following graph, provided by Carl Shaulis of Salion (see Salion success story), illustrates the downward trend of defects found when testing a collection of products in a software product line, both in a single release of products and across multiple releases of the products. Each colored curve represents a sequence of product tests for a simultaneous release of products in a product line. Each downward-sloping curve shows that defects found in early product tests (e.g., Product A) reduce the number of defects found in subsequent product tests (e.g., Product B). The downward trend of overall defects from Release 1 to Release 2 to Release 3 illustrates that high quality software assets are emerging due to high levels of commonality and carefully managed variations from release to release.
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Development Tools
and Methods for Software Product Lines Special Seminar from Telelogic and BigLever Software. MDD for Software Product Lines |
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