Time-to-Market Benefits of Software Product Lines

If new products in a software product line can be engineered and brought to market faster, the following strategic business benefits result:

Companies with software product line success stories have reported decreasing their time-to-market for new products by factors of 2 to 50 when compared to the conventional techniques they were using before (see the Cummins success story).

Some of the tactical pains experienced by engineering organizations that might be able to benefit from the time-to-market improvements of software product lines include:

• contentious relationship between marketing and engineering teams due to engineering's inability to accommodate business requests for more product variations
• complex and time consuming coordination of multiple parallel development efforts that share common software (for example, diverging and merging code bases or bushy configuration management branch structures)
• brittle source code that is difficult and error-prone to extend with new product variations

Software product line approaches improve time-to-market by enabling delta engineering. Delta engineering means that the only new software development required for a new product instance is for new variation points in the software assets to accommodate capabilities that are truly unique to the new product (that is, capabilities that don't already exist for other products). Beyond that, the new product instance can be created from the stable collection of existing common assets, variation points, the decision model, and the production mechanism.

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