Calculating ROI for software product lines

Product line engineering has become an important and widely used approach for efficiently developing portfolios of software products. The idea is to develop a set of products as a single, coherent development task from a core asset base (sometimes called a platform), a collection of artifacts specifically designed for use across a portfolio. This approach produces order-of-magnitude economic improvements compared to one-at-a-time software system development. Because the product line approach isn´t limited to specific technical properties of the planned software but rather focuses on economic characteristics, high return on investment has become the anthem of the approach´s protagonists. Our software product line cost model can calculate the costs and benefits (and hence the ROI) that we can expect to accrue from various product line development situations. It´s also straightforward and intuitive.