Software product families: Towards compositionality

Abstract

Software product families have become the most successful approach to intra-organizational reuse. Especially in the embedded systems industry, but also elsewhere, companies are building rich and diverse product portfolios based on software platforms that capture the commonality between products while allowing for their differences. Software product families, however, easily become victims of their own success in that, once successful, there is a tendency to increase the scope of the product family by incorporating a broader and more diverse product portfolio. This requires organizations to change their approach to product families from relying on a pre-integrated platform for product derivation to a compositional approach where platform components are composed in a product-specific configuration. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.