Organizing for Software Product Lines

Software product lines have received increasing amounts of attention within the software engineering community, especially from industry. Most authors focus on the technical and process aspects and assume an organizational model consisting of a domain engineering unit and several application engineering units. In our cooperation with several software development organizations applying software product line principles, we have identified several other organizational models that are employed. This article presents a number of organizational models, organized in four main approaches, i.e. development department, business units, domain engineering units and hierarchical domain engineering units. For each approach, its characteristics, applicability and advantages and disadvantages are discussed, as well as an example.