A Cooperative Model for Cross-Divisional Product Development for a Software Product Line

Abstract

Organizations developing software for families of related products must meet the challenge of leveraging software development effort across the product families, while still allowing individual product teams to focus on developing their specific products. This can be a tough balancing act: too much centralization can result in slow decision making, increased time to market and conflict between product teams. Too little centralization can waste opportunities for leverage and can increase redundant and incompatible development. In this paper we explore an approach that is very similar to the traditional notion of cooperative organizations. We show how product teams are organized into a software cooperative, and examine the key roles that support this organizational model. We reason about why this model is successful. We also show how this organizational model is facilitated by an explicit software architecture, and by a specific software configuration management approach.