In Three Steps to Software Product Lines: a Practical Example from the Automotive Industry

Abstract

In the automotive industry, suppliers aim to increase their revenue and try to keep up with the pace of the market trends to stay competitive by offering off-the-shelf products to car manufacturers. On the other hand those car manufacturers request tailored products to gain unique selling points. Each new customer request may result in a new software project. To save time one might find it a good idea to create the new software project as a copy of an older one. This method guarantees initial functionality, but prevents refactoring and leads to continuous software erosion. The implementations diverge from each other and improvements cannot be shared. Software Product Lines (SPL) can help to maximize reusability and quality by building up shared core assets and customer-specific functionality. In our paper, we propose a method to migrate a customer project landscape into a scalable SPL in three steps.