Business Value through Product Line Engineering - A Case Study

Software product line (PL) engineering has been established in the last decade as a proven way to build flexibility and reusability into software systems. This approach is centred around the idea that the initial investments made in the development of reusable artefacts are outweighed by the quality and product improvements gained through the reuse of such artefacts. While there are many studies on introducing PL engineering into software development and calculating expected value upfront, there is little documented evidence of long-term experiences with PL engineering. This paper examines perceptions of the value of PL engineering for three PL of different ages. The paper confirms that, while PL engineering enhances product value and quality through shared components and architecture, this is also the predominant limitation of PL engineering. Furthermore, our investigations show that while perceptions of product quality differ depending on PL maturity, this is not the case for time-to-market and cost.