Managing domain-specific, product-line development

Of the various software reuse initiatives, the most promising are those that recognize that reuse is a design characteristic that must be planned for, reusability is not an inherent property of software. One such initiative is product-line development, which seeks to achieve reuse across a domain, or family, of systems. We used product-line development on a demonstration project to develop real-time training systems for flight crews. The $14 million demonstration project revealed that product-line development requires a mature process and a sophisticated support environment.