Context Of Product Families Research Articles

EXPRESSING PRODUCT DIVERSIFICATION — CATEGORIZING AND CLASSIFYING VARIABILITY IN SOFTWARE PRODUCT FAMILY ENGINEERING

In a software product family context, software architects design architectures that support product diversification in both space (multiple contexts) and time (changing contexts). Product diversification is based on the concept of variability: a single architecture and a set of components support a family of products. Software product families have to support increasing amounts of variability, thereby making variability engineering a primary concern in software product family development. The first part of this paper (1) suggests a two-dimensional, orthogonal categorization of variability realization techniques and classifies these variability categories into system maturity levels. The second part (2) discusses a case study of an industrial software product family of mobile communication infrastructure for professional markets such as the military. The study categorizes and classifies the variability in this product family according to criteria common to virtually all software development projects.

Representing variability in a family of MRI scanners

AbstractPromoting software reuse is probably the most promising approach to the cost‐effective development and evolution of quality software. An example of reuse is the successful adoption of software product families in industry. In a product family context, software architects anticipate product variation and design architectures that support product derivation in both space (multiple contexts) and time (changing contexts). Product derivation is based on the concept of variability: a single architecture and a set of components support a family of products. Modern software product families need to support increasing amounts of variability, leading to a situation where variability engineering becomes of primary concern. Variability is often introduced as an ‘add‐on’ to the system without taking the consequences for more than one lifecycle phase such as design or architecture into account. This paper (1) suggests a Variability Categorization and Classification Model (VCCM) for representing variability in the software lifecycle and (2) discusses a case study of a large‐scale software product family of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners developed by Philips Medical Systems. The study illustrates how variability can be made an integral part of system development at different levels of abstraction. VCCM has been applied to the scanner family as an analysis tool. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.