Organizing the asset base for product derivation

Optimal organization of the asset base in a software product line (SPL) depends on how the assets are used to produce products. It has been assumed that collecting an appropriate set of assets would automatically lead to economically produced products. However, industry experience suggests that simply having the right assets is not sufficient to allow easy assembly of products. One problem is the difficulty of finding and selecting the desired asset during product derivation. We evaluate the effect that organizing the asset base in different ways has on the ability to find a desired asset during product derivation. We evaluate asset organization based on: key domain abstractions, architecture, and features. We evaluate these organizations against the criteria of: natural division, easy to find, generally applicable, reasonably sized groups, and similarly sized groups.