Scalability Benefits of Software Product Lines

A company that takes a software product line approach needs to scale, without constraints, to whatever number of products are optimal for the business. Looking more carefully at the productivity graph from the previous section, both conventional and software product line approaches do have limits to the number of products that can be effectively developed and maintained. As shown in the graph below, a steep rise in effort is encountered when an approach reaches its complexity limit. The benefit of software product line approaches is that they can often scale to orders-of-magnitude more products than conventional software engineering techniques (see the Engenio/LSI Logic success story).

There are strategic competitive advantages to being able to scale to larger numbers of products. For example,

• going into larger numbers of markets with tailored products
• creating larger numbers of more narrowly focused products within a market
• providing greater variety and more targeted products than competitors

The complexity limit typically manifests itself as an overwhelming increase in errors and defects. The results is that engineers spend all of their time finding and fixing defects in existing products rather than developing the next product. The errors and complexity can be attributed to limitations in (1) how effectively commonality leveraged across products and (2) how effectively variation is managed among products. The more effectively these two things are done, the greater the scalability of the approach.

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