Beyond product families: Building a product population?

Abstract

Building a large variety of products in a global organization, with software development distributed around the world, requires an approach which must not only have a sound technical basis for handling diversity and commonality, but where also the software development process and organization must be aligned optimally. In our case, the diversity of products is so large that we'd rather speak of a product population than of a product family. We find it helpful to use an approach that emphasizes composition over decomposition, and that embodies different types of processes (architecture, subsystem and product development) that are mapped to development sites in the organization.