Software Product Line Case Studies

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More and more organizations are turning to software product lines as a solution to their time-to-market, productivity, flexibility, and mass customization needs. Hewlett-Packard, Cummins, Inc., General Motors, CelsiusTech, Rockwell-Collins, Motorola, Philips, Nokia, Boeing, Raytheon, and Salion, Inc. have taken a product line approach for their software, exploited the commonality among similar systems, and experienced cost and schedule improvements and decreased technical risk.

For example:

Cummins, Inc., was able to field more than 1000 separate products based on just 20 software builds. They can build and integrate the software for a new diesel engine in about a week, whereas before, it took a year. Their production capability allowed them to quickly enter and dominate the industrial diesel engine market.
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office commissioned a software product line of satellite ground control systems from Raytheon and enjoyed a 10x quality improvement and a 7x productivity improvement as a result.
CelsiusTech Systems was able to decrease their software staff from 210 to around 30, while turning out more, larger, and more complex ship command and control system products. The product line approach let them change the hardware-to-software ratio for their systems from 35:65 to 80:20.

In addition:

Nokia was able to increase their production of mobile phones from 5-10 new models per year to over 30 new models per year.
Hewlett Packard reported a 400% productivity improvement and a 2-7x time-to-market improvement for a product line of printers.
Motorola saw a 4x cycle-time improvement in its product line of pagers.

The SEI has written a number of comprehensive case studies that relate how real organizations have adopted and succeeded with software product line engineering. These include:

Brownsword, Lisa & Clements, Paul. A Case Study in Successful Product Line Development (CMU/SEI-96-TR-016).
Clements, Paul C. & Northrop, Linda M. Salion, Inc.: A Software Product Line Case Study (CMU/SEI-2002-TR-038).
Clements, Paul; Cohen, Sholom; Donohoe, Patrick; Northrop, Linda. Control Channel Toolkit: A Software Product Line Case Study (CMU/SEI-2001-TR-030).
Bergey, John K. & Goethert, Wolfhart B. Developing a Product Line Acquisition Strategy for a DoD Organization: A Case Study (CMU/SEI-2001-TN-021).
Cohen, Sholom. Case Study: Building and Communicating a Business Case for a DoD Product Line (CMU/SEI-2001-TN-020).
O'Brien, Liam. Architecture Reconstruction to Support a Product Line Effort: Case Study (CMU/SEI-2001-TN-015).

The book Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns contains three case studies of its own:

Control Channel Toolkit, a software product line of satellite ground control systems procured for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office ;
Cummins, Inc.'s software product line of diesel engine control software; and
Market Maker Software AG's software product line of web-based financial information software¹.

The Software Product Line Hall of Fame contains short descriptions of successful software product lines along with sources of further information about each.

More software product line success stories and experience reports can be found

in the proceedings of the Software Product Line Conferences.
in SEI product line workshop reports where industry and DoD attendees have shared their product line practices, experience, and issues.
on the successes page of the community software product line site.

Finally, the SEI has created a catalog of software product lines. The catalog lists publically accessible references where you can read about software product lines.

What about your organization? Write to tell us what your organization is doing with software product lines, and we’ll post it here and/or in the software product line catalog. Catalog entries must include publicly accessible reference(s) where people can go read about it, and the reference(s) must make it clear that the example is a true software product line.

1. Additional information on the Market Maker Software AG's software product line is available at:
"Five Years of Product Line Engineering in a Small Company," 534 - 543. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, St. Louis, MO, 2005, ISBN:1-59593-963-2.