Software Product Lines – An Agile Success Factor?

Abstract

AbstractIntroducing agility into the systems and software engineering process important, as customers demand more flexibility. For companies it is essential to react on changing requirements as well as on changing market demands.A catalog of Agile Systems Engineering success factors also lists ”flexible product (line) architecture”. Being counterintuitive at first sight, the relation between these agile success factors and Software Product Lines (SPL) is discussed. Equally well, the concepts of SPL are mapped to a top-down Systems Engineering (SE) approach as possible SE implementation approach.A closer look at these mappings reveals what we call an agile continuum. It represents a time line of binding times in an SPL from domain definition time to runtime. Binding of variability can occur at any of these times. It has been named a continuum, as there is no clear point in time, when the product line process is finished and the product life cycle starts. In this respect, the concepts of ”flexible product lines” (processes) and ”flexible products” form a continuous spectrum.KeywordsSuccess FactorSoftware Product LineProduct ArchitectureAgile MethodBinding TimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.