A software product line is a method of producing a product in a team or groups intensively that shared a common managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a customer and that developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way.
A software product line is similarity based software system in that system products produced by mutual sharing of resources. Software product lines are providing as an important development scenario allowing companies to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in time to market, cost, productivity, quality, and other business drivers. Software product line is like a Product Engineering Services that involves the entire lifecycle of a product development. This phenomenon of product development also work with reliability of product and developers are always trying for improving the product’s quality day by day although improvement of quality should not affect the cost of the product. Product engineering services are like a portfolio under which all the services which needed for the product development provided by the service providers. Product engineering services includes the manufacturing of the product. Product engineering service also includes testing process of the product.
Software Product Line Architecture –
- Software product line architecture represents a significant investment of time and effort, usually by senior talent. So it is natural to want to maximize the return on this investment by reusing architecture across multiple systems.
- Many software-producing organizations started to produce products that resemble each other more than they differ. This is a platform for reusing the architecture across these similar products.
- The vision is of a set of reusable assets based on a common architecture and the software elements that populate that architecture.
- The core assets include designs, project management artifacts such as budgets and schedules, software test plans and test cases, and more.
- Core assets, including the architecture, are usually designed with built-in variation points – places where they could be quickly tailored in replanted ways.
Software product line development uses Offshore Software Development which is a practice in a software development organization hires an external organization for the development of software of the customer’s country. In offshore software development, another country’s third-party involved due to the high-cost demand of the same country service providers.
Software product line also provides Embedded Product Development method.
Benefits of Software product line –
Software product line is important because of remarkable efficiencies it has shown in the engineering process. Software product line always provides
- Large-scale productivity gains.
- Decreased time to market.
- Increased product quality.
- Decreased product risk.
- Increased market agility.
- Increased customer satisfaction.
- Ability to effect mass customization.
- More efficient use of human resources.
- Ability to keep up market presence.
- Ability to sustain unprecedented growth.
A software product line approach provides an opportunity to future market opportunities. Even though exact opportunities and their certainty are impossible to predict, by exercising variation points in the core assets, product lines permit low-cost, low-risk experiments to explore opportunities.
