Project management in a software product line organization

In traditional software engineering project management, managers provide focused guidance to a team responsible for producing a specific result in a specified amount of time. Today, however, organizations are increasingly taking a product line approach to software to exploit product commonalities. Software product line organizations have unique practices and project definitions. These unconventional features offer new challenges and directions for traditional project management. How does the traditional concept of a project - a temporary endeavor aimed at creating a unique product or service - hold up under this new paradigm? In this article, we discuss this question, along with how the idea of a "project" and project management techniques must expand to fit a product line context. In particular, we show how the "overall guidelines, policies, and procedures" that Thayer and Pyster spoke of some years ago remain crucially important in product line organizations today.