Salion, Inc.: A Software Product Line Case Study
6
Conclusion
The fact that Salion has the following things in common with other successful product line organizations underscores the importance of those things being common denominators of success:
- Salion has a need for a successful software product line approach that is directly connected to its success as an emerging company.
- Salion has several product line champions. It is an organization that strives mightily (and successfully) to make all its organizational departments speak the same language, share the same vision, and strive for the same goals.
- Salion has a strong architecture-driven approach, a talented architecture team, and a robust, flexible product line architecture. Salion's chief architect provides strong and clearly articulated principles (such as avoiding complexity wherever possible) that are derived from the need to satisfy the company's business plan.
- Salion has an involved and committed management team that proactively supports the product line approach.
- Salion is an organization that is not only comfortable with but thrives on a high degree of process discipline.
In addition, there are other characteristics of this organization that point to a successful software product line:
- Salion's team drives for best practices and excellence in software development.
- Salion enthusiastically embraces metrics and tracking to help it manage its production, uncover areas of high-payoff improvement, and self-diagnose.
- Salion fosters a culture that is not afraid to try new things, such as state-of-the-art tools or an innovative best-of-breed mix of three different process paradigms.
- Salion is a self-aware organization that welcomes critical introspection and thoughtful review.
Salion's software product line story is the story of a small, nimble organization that from the beginning recognized that a reactive product line approach was the way to achieve flexibility in an application domain in which the future could not be predicted reliably. How Salion achieved success with this model, evolved its scope, became more concrete over time, skillfully managed an innovative process model, and gathered fundamental insights about customization versus configuration are all parts of Salion's unique story.
[Title Page]
[Abstract]
[Acknowledgments]
[1 Introduction]
[2 Background]
[3 How Salion Builds Its Software Product Line]
[4 Payoffs and Benefits]
[5 Conclusions and Lessons Learned]
[6 Conclusions]
[7 For Further Reading]
[References] [DTIC Page]
[PDF file]
