Agile Tames Product Line Variability

Abstract

This article proposes an agile development method and its management method for multiple product lines of automotive software systems. In product line development, the problem area is divided into the domain engineering and application engineering for delivering diverse products. Now, the development of automotive software requires agility and extreme diversity. Conventional simple product line model could not accommodate the requirements. Therefore, we developed an agile development method for automotive multiple product lines. First, we propose an agile development method for multiple product lines by iteratively reusing process assets in application engineering. To manage the diversity of the products derived from the multiple product lines, we propose a management method which integrates the portfolio management and product development management into the agile development method. We applied the proposed method to the development of multiple product lines for our automotive software systems, and demonstrated a reduction of the cost and complexity of the multiple product lines, and improvement of on-time delivery.