Organizing for software product line engineering

Software product line engineering is the discipline of engineering a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way. The organizational characteristics required to successfully carry out software product line engineering will vary according to an organization's needs. However in general competitive advantage in software product line engineering lies in an organization's capacity to learn and adapt its products accordingly. This paper presents the conditions for a learning organization from management theory and argues that these conditions must prevail for software product line engineering to succeed.