Exploring communities of practice for product family engineering

Abstract

Product Family Engineering (PFE) is an approach to software engineering that seeks to reduce the global effort in producing multiple software products by actively promoting and governing the reuse of assets between the family members. However, PFE is highly demanding, putting stringent demands on careful planning and management in the organization. To leverage the full opportunities offered by PFE, its introduction and use requires effective coordination of people and organizational units. This paper presents a solution to support this coordination by exploring concepts from the area of communities of practices for PFE. The expected benefit is that communities offer a more adaptive approach supporting the transition towards PFE compared to formal organizational restructuring. In this paper, we will describe our considerations about the building principles for organizations using a shared platform for the family members and a study proposal that will examine the effects of knowledge brokering among Communities of Practice as a means to assist PFE. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.