Different Aspects of Product Family Adoption

Ericsson has successfully developed two large-scale telecommunication systems based on reusing the same software architecture, software process, and many other core assets. The approach to initiating a product family has been a lightweight approach, and many artifacts are evolved during product family adoption, although not to the same degree. The software architecture has evolved to support reuse and handling of variations, while the software process model is not updated for product family engineering and reuse. We discuss what works and doesn’t work in the current process model, and why it is important to synchronize it with the practice of software development. Product family adoption has raised challenges in many aspects of software development such as requirement management, and measurement. These processes should also be evolved to fit the software development approach.