Product-line architectures in industry: a case study

In this paper, a case study investigating the experiences from using product-line architectures is presented involving two Swedish companies, Axis Communications AB and Securitas Larm AB. Key persons in these organizations have been interviewed and information has been collected from documents and other sources. The study identified a collection of problems and issues. The identified problems include the amount of required background knowledge, information distribution, the need for multiple versions of assets, dependencies between assets, use of assets in new contexts, documentation, tool support, management support and effort estimation. Issues collected from the case study are the questioned necessity of domain engineering units, business units versus development departments, time-to-market versus asset quality and common features versus feature superset. For each problem, a problem description, an example, underlying causes, available solutions and research issues are identified whereas for each issue the advantages and disadvantages of each side are discussed.