Key Activities for Introducing Software Product Lines into Multiple Divisions: Experience at Hitachi

This paper reports introducing software product lines (SPLs) into multiple divisions at Hitachi. For any divisions developing software for product families that have many variations, an SPL is the key to improving quality, cost, and development efficiency. To introduce SPLs into multiple business divisions from small embedded systems to large power control systems, we organized an SPL project across organizations. Throughout the project, we have successfully introduced SPLs into multiple divisions and identified common and useful activities such as evaluating legacy systems, training domain experts, and sharing experiences with SPL experts. We also report the lessons learned from our experiences about SPL adoptions.