To Merge or Not to Merge: Managing Software Product Families

A large number of companies, especially in the automotive, electronics, aerospace and defense domains, develop a portfolio of closely related software products designed to satisfy similar, yet not identical, needs of their customers (a.k.a. a software product line). Even though numerous software product line engineering approaches promise to ease the product line development and maintenance effort, in practice, the adoption of such approaches is still limited. Instead, products are often established ad-hoc, e.g., by copying existing variants and modifying them to fit the requirements of a new customer or market segment. In this paper, we discuss reasons leading organizations to employ cloning to realize their product lines. We then present two strategies for efficient management of cloned product variants: (1) the unification of the variants into single-copy representations promoted by product line engineering methods and (2) the construction of a management infrastructure on top of existing cloned variants, to mitigate the shortcomings of cloning while leveraging its benefits. We outline existing work that contributes to the implementation of these two strategies and identify opportunities for future research.