By the Numbers

Here are several more achievements and benefits that we think are unique to the Salion success story:

• Salion was the first to adopt and report on experiences with the reactive approach to software product lines
• Salion was the first to use and report on experiences with commercial off-the-shelf software product line technology
• Salion made the transition to software product lines with 2 person-months of effort, the equivalent of 1% of the effort required to build its baseline enterprise software product. This is two orders-of-magnitude less than previously reported efforts with proactive software product line transition efforts.
• Salion has achieved 90-day time-to-market intervals for seven new commercial products in its software product line. The total effort to implement these new product variants ranges from 5% to 10% of the effort required for the baseline product (i.e., factor of 10 to 20 productivity improvement).
• Salion was the first to report on agile and refactoring techniques applied to software product lines. By identifying and refactoring emerging abstractions in the core assets, the size of the core asset base continuous to shrink even as the functionality, variation, and number of products that can be instantiated continue to grow. In a typical example, refactoring a variation point reduced the lines of variant code per family member from an average of 1600 to 250.

By taking a reactive software product line approach and using off-the-shelf technology, Salion has been able to reap the benefits of software product lines while remaining agile in the face of turbulence in the application domain.

Additional Information

Clements, P. and Northrop, L., Salion, Inc.: A Software Product Line Case Study, Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Technical Report CMU/SEI-2002-TR-038, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, November 2002.

Krueger, C. and Churchett, D., Eliciting Abstractions from a Software Product Line, in Proceedings of the OOPSLA 2002 PLEES International Workshop on Product Line Engineering. Seattle, Washington. November 2002, pages 43-48.

Buhrdorf, R., Churchett, D. and Krueger, C. Salion's Experience with a Reactive Software Product Line Approach, in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Product Family Engineering. Siena, Italy. November 2003.

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