Assemble Your Team

In most organizations, change does not come easy. Thus it is important to assemble a team of proven change agents that are capable and motivated to lead the transition to software product lines.

Product line success stories often have both a technical champion and a management champion that effectively promote the advantages of software product lines up and down the technical and management hierarchies. Think about who in your organization needs to be convinced and who else you may need to enlist to convince them.

In his book The Tipping Point (see the Books page), Malcolm Galdwell describes three types of people that work in conjunction to make change happen: evangelists, mavens, and connectors. You will likely want to include a good mix of these personality types on your team:

• your evangelist will typically be a charismatic and extroverted person that can and will stand up in any crowd to convincingly tell the software product line story
• your maven will be the technical expert that can convincingly address all of the technical issues surrounding software product lines
• your connector will be one of those people who "knows everyone who is anyone" in your organization and will facilitate the introductions into all of the teams that may be affected by a software product line approach (development, test, configuration management, build, documentation, product management, marketing, sales, executive management)

It is important that the team have one or two respected individuals that provide strong, clear, constant, and consistent leadership.

All this being said, the final piece of advice is to keep the team as small as possible. In the ideal case, only two people (you and someone else) fill all of the roles of technical champion, management champion, evangelist, maven, connector, and team leader.

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