Scheduling Product Line Features for Effective Roadmapping

Large industrial product lines may produce tens of thousands of variants each year. Each variant typically contains both reusable assets as well as product specific code created by different organizational units. To produce this vast number of variants the organizational resources must be used efficiently. For roadmapping this means an ability to schedule production of reusable assets so that all variants can be completed according to their requirements. When aiming for centralized variability management, roadmapping requires effective management of product line feature dependences and priorities. In this paper, we first introduce the problems haunting feature roadmapping in industrial product lines. Then we investigate how these problems can be solved using a novel approach for organizing product lines based on our practical experiences. Finally, we discuss our experiences and compare our approach with results by other researchers.