Software Engineering Institute

Software product lines are of strategic importance to the organizations that adopt them, affecting both an organization’s position in an existing market and its ability to react to new and changing markets. An organization’s production system (i.e., how it builds its products) is also of strategic importance, directly affecting, for example, that organization’s ability to deliver new products quickly (i.e., its time to market). 

The production strategy for a software product line is the high-level description of how the production system realizes both the core assets and products. The production strategy is derived from the organization’s business strategy and is intended to coordinate the actions of the core asset and product developers. The strategy describes how the product line practices should be employed so that the product line organization will achieve its production goals. This technical note describes a technique, which is based on well-known procedures for defining and evaluating a business strategy, for formulating the production strategy of a production system. An example of strategy creation is provided.