Dynamic Complexity and the Owen Firmware Product Line Program

Since the paper "A Cooperative Model for Cross-Divisional Product Development for a Software Product Line" by Toft et al., (2000) was presented at SEI SPLC 2000, the Owen firmware program has undergone considerable evolution. The scope and variation of the product line has grown by 10x and lines of code from 500 K to over 5 M. To accomplish this, Owen has survived some major growing pains but still maintained its core model and principles that had made it successful. This year, Owen celebrates 10 years of firmware product line engineering. This paper seeks to describe how Owen has responding to increasing dynamic complexity at the business and engineering level in order to support the increasing demands of the HP inkjet product family.