4 Decision Framework

When implemented successfully, software product families provide substantial benefits to the organization in terms of development effort, time-to-market of new features and products and the level of integration of the product portfolio. However, in order to achieve these benefits, the organization first has to adopt the product family approach, which is a major change process in the organization, primarily affecting the R&D organization, but also product management, marketing and other groups in the organization.

One can identify three stages that product family adoption typically evolves through, i.e. the early success phase, the expanding scope phase and the increasing “maturity” phase. Below, we present for each of the decision dimensions, the alternatives that in the typical case are the preferred ones. Specific organizations may deviate from these for legitimate reasons.

4.1 Initial Adoption - Early successes

The first stage that organizations adopting software product families go through is the initial adoption. During this stage the first steps are made away from independent product teams. In this stage, it is important to minimize the number of impact of the required changes, to maximize the chance of success and to maximize the benefits from the success.

The initial adoption phase ends with the successful integration of one or more shared components in at least two products. At this point, the product family initiative has, hopefully, achieved its first successes and there is hard evidence that the benefits of product family engineering can be achieved in the context of the organization.

4.1.1 Decision dimensions

In this section, we discuss, for each decision dimension, the preferred alternative as well as the situations in which an organization should deviate from it.

Feature selection: new, but common features

The preferred alternative for the features to be implemented as a product family are those that have not yet been implemented by the existing products, but are needed by at least one or two products in the next release.