A case study of two configurable software product families

Abstract

A configurable software product family allows the deployment of individual products without customer-specific design or programming effort. Despite the fact that such software product families have recently gained research interest, there are only few empirical studies on them. This paper presents some results of a descriptive case study undertaken in two companies that develop and deploy configurable software product families. The similarities found in comparisons between characteristics of the configurable software product families were remarkable, although the companies, products, and application domains were different. The study shows that the configurable software product family approach is already applied in the industry. Furthermore, the approach seems to be a feasible and even efficient way to systematically develop a family of products and manage the variability within it. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.