Mass Customization and its Benefits

Software mass customization is a po werful business model as well as a powerful engineering model that enables software organizations to efficiently engineer a software product line comprising substantially similar variations of a software system. This document describes software mass customization in three parts. First is an overview of software mass customization and its benefits. Second is an introduction to software engineering technology that enables organizations to quickly adopt software mass customization as part of their business and engineering models. Third is a collection of scenarios of how software product organizations can rapidly adopt software mass customization. Softw are mass customization focuses on the means of efficiently producing and maintaining multiple similar software products, exploiting what they have in common and managing what varies among them. This is analogous to what is practiced in the automotive industry, where the focus is on creating a single production line, out of which many customized but similar variations of a car model are produced. The powerful, though subtle, essence of this description is the focus on a singular means of production rather than a focus on producing the many individual products. Once the means of mass customization is established, production of the individual products is more a matter of automated instantiation rather than manual creation. Real world success stories of software mass customization come from diverse areas such as mobile phones, e-commerce software, RAID storage systems, computer printers , diesel engines, telecom networks, enterprise software, construction and mining equipment, cars, ships, and airplanes. Each of these examples relies on creating and maintaining a collection of similar software systems. For example, a mobile phone company may have tens or hundreds of different phone models, each of which uses software that is unique though substantially similar to software in the other models. New models may be introduced every two weeks. By using software mass customization techniques to exploit what their software systems have in common and to effectively manage the variation, companies are reporting order of magnitude reductions in time-to-market, engineering overhead, error rates, and cost[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. What is most interesting from these success stories, however, is that the tactical improvements in software engineering are large enough to have strategic impact on the business of a company. By bringing larger numbers of precisely customized products to market faster, with better quality, and with less effort than their competitors, companies have been able to assume market leadership.