Salion, Inc.: A Software Product Line Case Study

Our interviews at Salion were conducted in two phases, separated by nine months. During the first phase, Salion had not yet landed its first customer, and many of its plans and approaches could be characterized as tentative and hopeful. During our second visit, Salion was working on a system for its third customer, and the difference in tone was striking. Confidence in its approach was high, and speculation was replaced by assertion. Salion is now in a position to recognize and recount the significant benefits it has reaped from its product line approach, some of which we describe here.

First and foremost, Salion can produce and support sophisticated, highly secure, high-availability, COTS-intensive systems with a minimum of staff. Currently, there are 21 people in the company. Seven are counted as developers, plus one who is in charge of QA and one who is in charge of the build process. As the first round of interviews for this report was being taken, Salion had produced its 12^th in a series of 30-day releases, all of which were on schedule.

Salion's product line approach lets this small staff work very productively. Building the standard product took 190 person-months. Building the first customer product took just 15 person-months and achieved a phenomenal 97% reuse level. Projections for the second customer product are for 30% less effort still. This second product is on track and expected to be delivered "with room to spare."

From a business perspective, Salion's product line approach helps it deal with its investors. Every start-up has to deal and struggle with growth. Venture capital can get a company up and running and serving its first few customers, but of course the end game is for the company to become self-sustaining with a very large customer base. So, the people funding the start-up ask "How are you going to scale?" Usually the answer involves rewriting the product to make it more robust, increasing the development and QA staff by some integer multiple, and moving into a larger office space. Salion has a much different answer: it is poised to grow (in terms of its customer base) exactly as it is. Its organization, process, and architecture--in short, its product line approach--provides it with vast untapped capacity. This capacity makes Salion a very attractive place for its investors to put their money, because the company features a low "burn rate" compared to conventional organizations. As Salion's chief technical officer (CTO) put it, in the next round of funding, the company will be able to ask for half as much and do twice as much with it. In its third major round, it expects to be supporting 10-15 customer products with a staff that is still tiny by comparison to non-product-line-based software organizations.