Software Product Lines Beyond Software Development

The impact of software product lines to software development and maintenance costs has been well documented. Reduced time to market and number of people required to develop and support a company's software products constitute some of these savings. However, the actual savings model is more than just savings within the software development community. In fact, the savings realized directly by the software community may not be the biggest savings in the company. At Cummins Inc., we have realized impacts outside of embedded software development because of the use of software product lines. Service tool development costs for a product within the product line is 10% of those products outside the product line. Other impacts in areas like customer engineering, technician efficiency, calibration development, service engineering, management, and customer satisfaction are often harder to quantify, but these areas reap positive benefits from the product line architecture. This brings more of a business level to product line engineering.