Ideas on How Product-Line Engineering Can be Extended∗

Product-line engineering can result in cost savings and increases in productivity. In addition, in safetycritical systems, the approach has the potential for reuse of analysis and testing results which can lead to a safer system. Nevertheless, there are times when it seems like a product family approach should work when, in fact, there are difficulties in properly defining the boundaries of the product family. In this paper, we present a position on ndimensional and hierarchical product families, which we have recently introduced. This paper focuses on our initial thoughts on how making n-dimensional and hierarchical families has the potential to affect the product-line development process as well as how using this approach might enable more organizations to use product-line approaches.