Product Line Development – an Overview

Products with new features need to be introduced on the market in a rapid pace and organizations need to speed up their development process. The ordinary way to develop products, one at a time, is not time efficient enough and is costly. Reuse has been suggested as a solution, but to achieve effective reuse within an organization a planned and proactive effort must be used. Product lines are the most promising technique and it increases productivity and software quality and decreases time-to-market. It makes the organization more competitive on the market and gives them a less costly production. But there are also difficulties involved in converting to a product line approach. If the business case is incorrectly performed the organization may do the conversion under wrong assumptions. This paper describes a way to develop a product line and also addresses what the benefits are and what criteria the organization needs to fulfil to consider converting to a product line approach.