Product family engineering

Product family engineering (PFE), also known as product line engineering, is a synonym for "domain engineering" created by the Software Engineering Institute, a term coined by James Neighbors in his 1980 dissertation at University of California, Irvine. Software product lines are quite common in our daily lives, but before a product family can be successfully established, an extensive process has to be followed. This process is known as product family engineering.

Product family engineering can be defined as a method that creates an underlying architecture of an organization's product platform. It provides an architecture that is based on commonality as well as planned variabilities. The various product variants can be derived from the basic product family, which creates the opportunity to reuse and differentiate on products in the family.

Product family engineering is a relatively new approach to the creation of new products. It focuses on the process of engineering new products in such a way that it is possible to reuse product components and apply variability with decreased costs and time. Product family engineering is all about reusing components and structures as much as possible.

Several studies have proven that using a product family engineering approach for product development can have several benefits (Carnegie Mellon (SEI), 2003). Here is a list of some of them:

The Nokia case mentioned below also illustrates these benefits.

The product family engineering process consists of several phases. The three main phases are:

The process has been modeled on a higher abstraction level. This has the advantage that it can be applied to all kinds of product lines and families, not only software. The model can be applied to any product family. Figure 1 (below) shows a model of the entire process. Below, the process is described in detail. The process description contains elaborations of the activities and the important concepts being used. All concepts printed italic are explained in Table 1.

The first phase is the starting up of the whole process. In this phase some important aspects are defined especially with regard to economic aspects. This phase is responsible for outlining market strategies and defining a scope, which tells what should and should not be inside the product family.

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