November 5, 2009—Patrick Donohoe of the SEI will present part two of a three-part webinar series on software product line management at noon ET on Wednesday, November 11. This webinar is an introduction to the SEI Framework for Software Product Line Practice.

Software product lines have emerged as a new software development paradigm of great importance. A software product line is a set of software intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features, that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way.

Organizations developing a portfolio of products as a software product line are experiencing order-of-magnitude improvements in cost, time to market, staff productivity, and quality of the deployed products. A product line succeeds because the commonalities shared by the software products can be exploited to achieve economies of production.

The SEI Framework for Software Product Line Practice is a web-based document that describes essential activities and practices that organizations must master in order to successfully adopt a product line approach.

Donohoe is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute Research, Technology, and System Solutions Program. His current interests are analysis modeling and production planning for software product lines.