Mass Customization of Enterprise Applications: Creating Customer- Oriented Product Portfolios instead of Single Systems

Applying Mass Customization and the underlying principle of modularization to Software seems a rather obvious idea, and the Software Engineering community has used the idea of modularization for over 30 years now. But, as many authors point out, reuse of program modules (nowadays with object-oriented programming being the dominant paradigm usually called components) never reached the level originally predicted. One of the reasons for this is the somewhat naïve idea that a software component developed for a specific context can be easily adopted by another programmer in another context. The concept of Software Product Lines avoids this problem by carefully analyzing and defining the context in which a component is to be reused in advance and reusing the component only in other applications used in the same context. Treating a number of applications as a set of applications instead of as single applications does by itself not lead to increased customer-orientation, but by incorporating the ideas behind Mass Customization, a Software Product Line can replace a single application and incorporate as many applications as are necessary to serve the customers targeted. This paper describes how the well-established quality method Quality Function Deployment (QFD) can be used to identify customer segments, and define members of the Software Product Line to satisfy the customer segments identified.