Planning and Managing Product Line Evolution

This paper addresses the management and evolution of products that comprise a configuration of reusable components. Software product lines provide an example, as their development requires the cooperation of multiple product teams that utilize common domain components. The different perspectives of the product and component teams in such environments are reviewed and contrasted, since the concerns of each have to be managed and balanced as the product line evolves. A matrix representation is used to depict the dependencies, recording both the individual agreements made between stakeholders and the aggregated plan. Matrices are shown to succinctly describe the marketplace or enterprise view capturing the two complementary but orthogonal perspectives of component producers and consumers. The Release Matrix is introduced as the multi-dimensional form of a traditional release plan and is related to formal Configuration Management principles as they apply to complex environments.