Moving toward software product lines in a small software firm: a case study

Product line engineering aims to take to the software development process the benefits of manufacturing processes where reuse and standardization lead to reduced costs, decreased time-to-market and improved product quality. The challenge is to capture, formalise and reuse past and present expertise in new projects, improving the software process and the products delivered to the customer. This paper present a case study regarding the introduction of domain analysis and object-oriented frameworks in a small software firm with the purpose to set-up a development environment based on product lines. The goal of the DOOM project was to evaluate the impact and the benefits of the introduction of a domain engineering approach in a specific domain, laying the groundwork for the definition of a corporate reuse program toward the introduction of a product line. In this paper we present the results achieved with the experiment and the lessons learnt.