Organization: virtual component team

The shared components developed in the first phase need to be maintained. In addition, the shared components created in this phase are mined based the product-specific implementations of these components. This requires, on the one hand, a team of people that is permanently assigned to a set of components. On the other hand, the team needs detailed knowledge of the product specific requirements. A virtual team, consisting of staff formally located at the product teams, provides an optimal balance between these concerns.

Funding: taxation

The effort required for the product family initiative as well as the importance of continuity of the members of the virtual component demand a strong commitment from the R&D organization. Informal agreements about development need to be replaced with a more formalized model that guarantees more continuity. The taxation model requires all units and teams, during the budget rounds, to reserve part of their resources for the product family initiative.

Shared component scoping: complete components with plug-in capability

The shared components replacing their product-specific counterparts should, preferably, be as easy to integrate as the original components. Consequently, it is necessary for these components to cover most of the features required by the products only requiring plug-ins for the features that are used by only one product.

4.3 Increasing “maturity”

Once the obvious product family components have been developed and the second phase of product family adoption has ended, the main challenge becomes to increase the “maturity” of the product family artefacts (see [Bosch 02]). The challenge in this phase is to lift the product family from the platform level at which it typically is after the second adoption phase to the product family and, if feasible, the configurable product base level.

4.3.1 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.