Product Line Agility in the Face of Turbulence
The Salion Success Story

Authors: Ross Buhrdorf, BetweenMarkets, Salion
Dale Churchett, Salion

In 2001, Salion was a startup preparing for its initial product launch. Even before we had completed our first product or had our first customer, we knew that we would have to solve the software product line problem – how to efficiently deploy and maintain a collection of nearly identical variations of our core product. The core product in this case was an enterprise software system that helps to optimize front-end processes for companies whose revenue stream starts by receiving and bidding on requests for quotes (RFQs).

Most of the product line methodologies being discussed at the time were proactive, requiring a stable, well defined, long range view of the application domain. However, Salion expected some turbulence in our domain model since we were inventing a new product in a new market and would be integrating the product into a wide variety of customer settings.

At about the same time, BigLever Software was promoting the notion of reactive software product line methodologies as well as commercial off-the-shelf product line technology. We decided to adopt this approach because it provided the shortest path to an operational software product line and it provided the agility to react to the expected turbulence in our application domain and product line. In hindsight, this decision was a central part of Salion's success in bringing our product line to market.

Several of the unique characteristics and benefits of from our approach can be seen in the way we made our transition to product lines, the way we deploy products without an application engineering team, and the way that we manage the reactive evolution of the product line scope.

The Transition

The unmodified architecture, design, and source modules from our initial baseline product served as the core assets for the product line. Initially, no variations were introduced into the core assets – we had a product line with one product. BigLever's tools and techniques were utilized to extend our existing development, configuration management and build systems so that we could efficiently react to new requirements for product variants. By utilizing the existing baseline product for core assets and off-the-shelf technology for software product line management, we made the transition to a reactive software product line approach in only 2 person-months of effort.

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