An important role of the SEI is to help the DoD and the software engineering community adopt cutting-edge software-development practices. One such practice is the use of a product line approach for software. Long a practice in traditional manufacturing, the concept of product lines is relatively new to the software industry.

Organizations developing software-intensive systems face many challenges, such as long development cycles, low return on software investments, and difficulty in software system integration. A product line approach to software can overcome these challenges.

Traditionally, software-intensive systems have been acquired, developed, tested, and maintained as separate products, even if these systems have a significant amount of common functionality and code. Such an approach wastes technical resources, and takes longer and costs more than necessary. Using a product line approach, each product is formed by taking applicable components from a base of common assets, tailoring them as necessary through planned variation mechanisms, adding any new components that may be necessary, and assembling the collection according to the rules of a common, product-line-wide architecture. Building a new product or system becomes more a matter of assembly or generation than creation, of integration rather than programming.

Organizations of all types and sizes are discovering that a product line strategy, when skillfully implemented, can yield enormous gains in productivity, quality, and time to market. Making the move to product lines, however, is a business and technical decision, and requires considerable changes in the way organizations practice software engineering, technical management, and organizational management.

The SEI is helping organizations adopt a software product line approach by defining the concepts, practices, activities, and guidance that ensure success.

Product line developments are becoming increasingly commonplace in the true commercial world...I strongly recommend that you obtain a copy of a new book, Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns, just published in 2002 by Addison-Wesley.
Lloyd Moseman II
Senior Vice President for Corporate Development, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), from the keynote speech he delivered at the
Air-Force-sponsored Software Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, UT

Purpose

The purpose of the SEI’s work in software product lines is to

>	enable developers and acquirers to exploit the demonstrated commercial benefits of software product line practice
>	promote the growth and maturation of techniques for finding and exploiting system commonalities and for controlling variability, and ensure that those techniques become standard software engineering practice in the DoD and industry
>	make product line development and acquisition a low-risk, high-return proposition

2002 Accomplishments

Product Line Framework Refined
During FY2002, the SEI incorporated the latest practices and real-world experiences into revised editions of its fundamental product line resources: Version 4.1 of the Framework for Software Product Line PracticeSM, which provides a comprehensive description of the essential activities and practices necessary for software product line success; and Version 2.0 of Software Product Line Acquisition: A Companion to a Framework for Software Product Line Practice, which provides the additional insights needed in a DoD acquisition environment.

In addition, the SEI refined the Product Line Technical ProbeSM (PLTPSM), the instrument for diagnosing an organization’s product line readiness, to include the concept of product line practice patterns. Patterns are a way of expressing common contexts and problem and solution pairs, in this case relative to a software product line effort. The patterns help organizations more readily understand their diagnosis and plan needed action.

To further assist organizations that have already undertaken software process improvement, the SEI published a comparison of the Framework for Software Product Line Practice to the CMMI® framework.

The product line patterns are the heart and the most condensed experience of the SEI's Framework for Software Product Line Practice...The patterns are specific processes that help to achieve only certain goals in a predefined environment. Though I think the [Framework] patterns can be improved and extended, they are much more meaningful to the product line community than any other product line process description I have seen up to now.
Stefan Ferber
Robert Bosch GmbH

Software Product Line Course Introduced
The SEI introduced a new two-day course, Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns, based on the book by the same name. The course is useful for anyone involved in or contemplating a software product line, and attendees in 2002 gave the course high ratings. This course was piloted in FY2002 and will be among the SEI’s public courses in FY2003.

SEI Hosts Fifth DoD Product Line Practice Workshop;
Second Software Product Line Conference
The SEI sponsored and organized the Fifth DoD Product Line Practice Workshop. Participants included representatives from U.S. military services and a variety of defense contractors. Presentations at this workshop included “Product Lines for DoD Open Air Ranges,” which detailed the success of a Navy product line, Rangeware; and “Acquisition of a Product Line for Army Live Training” and “Development of a Product Line Architecture for Army Live Training,” which described an Army product line from the perspectives of the acquirer and the contractor.

Growth of the software product line community is critical to widespread product line practice. The DoD workshop was one of nine focused product line workshops organized by members of the SEI technical staff during 2002 and was held in conjunction with the Second Software Product Line Conference (see the section about SPLC2).

More Organizations Adopt Product Line Approach
More product line success stories are emerging in both industry and the DoD. The SEI has collaborated directly on some, including the Naval Underwater Warfare Center’s Rangeware product line asset base that supports test, training, and evaluation missions at major ranges. Currently there is one system from the product line in operation at the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center and two ready to go live. There are three more systems in various stages of planning that will definitely use Rangeware and another five to eight programs that are candidates for employing product lines.

Other organizations, including Cummins, Raytheon, Robert Bosch GmbH, and Salion, report using the SEI’s Framework for Software Product Line Practice as a reference model in their efforts. These efforts further validate the benefits of software product lines and the approach’s viability in the DoD.