Process fusion: An industrial case study on agile software product line engineering

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2007.10.025

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume 81, Issue 6, June 2008, Pages 843-854

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2007.10.025 Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a software product company that has successfully integrated practices from software product line engineering and agile software development. We show how practices from the two fields support the company’s strategic and tactical ambitions, respectively. We also discuss how the company integrates strategic, tactical and operational processes to optimize collaboration and consequently improve its ability to meet market needs, opportunities and challenges. The findings from this study are relevant to software product companies seeking ways to balance agility and product management. The findings also contribute to research on industrializing software engineering.

Introduction

Software engineering is a complex task that involves fast-paced product development, competitive market conditions, knowledge management, organizational factors, rapidly evolving technologies, etc. As a means of handling this complexity, establishing control and using resources efficiently, development organizations normally adopt a method that defines how their software engineering activities should be carried out within the given context. A method may cover a broad range of issues; typically estimation, design, and development, among others. A great many methodologies are available and they vary a lot; from strict plan-based approaches to agile approaches and any variant in between. Regardless of the method being used, most software projects strive to reach a balance between three basic goals: satisfactory software quality (scope), the right cost and timely delivery. Attempting to satisfy these requirements causes further complications to arise, particularly with respect to long-term product management issues.

This paper discusses two popular development approaches; software product line engineering (SPLE) and agile software development (ASD). It describes how these have been combined to improve the ability to achieve the three basic goals. These two approaches can, in their most radical forms, be placed in each end of a plan-based/agile spectrum (Boehm, 2002). The former is based on planning and preparations for efficient software development based on rapid construction by assembling predeveloped assets, while the latter aims at efficient change response instead of extensive up-front planning. They may correspondingly be categorized as proactive and reactive approaches to software engineering. The principles of SPLE have been in use for a long time and industrial experience shows that the approach has substantial advantages when it comes to cost-efficient development, product quality and the ability to deliver on time (Birk et al., 2003, Linden, 2002, Bosch, 2000, Clements and Northrop, 2002). ASD is a more recent trend within the software engineering community and has attracted wide interest in both industry and academia. Initial evidence from the results of ongoing research suggests that using ASD is advantageous, given the right context (Boehm, 2002, Erickson et al., 2005). Both approaches have the same overall objective; that of improving software development efficiency.

Recently, there has been interest in investigating whether, and if so how, SPLE and ASD can be combined to complement each other (Carbon et al., 2006, Tian and Cooper, 2006), but little empirical research on the topic has been conducted. In this paper, we present our findings from a case study of a medium-sized, Norwegian software product company called CompNN (real name made anonymous). CompNN has used and matured the ASD method Evo, short for Evolutionary Project Management (Gilb, 2005) for three years, covering four releases of their main product.

Our study is based on a well established industry–researcher relationship that began several years ago. The study expands upon a previous one, in which we investigated the introduction and preliminary effects of Evo (Hanssen and Fægri, 2006). This previous study gave us insights into several important aspects of the use of an agile process in a product development context, with respect to benefits, problems and prerequisites.

The aim of the study reported herein was to describe and analyze an industrial case to understand how SPLE and ASD can be combined and to clarify associated costs and gains.

Next, we provide an overview of SPLE and ASD and explain how they both relate to, and conflict with, each other (Section 2). Then we explain the context of the case study (Section 3). Then, we present the study method (Section 4). Subsequently, we present the findings from the study (Section 5), discuss the results (Section 6) and offer our conclusions (Section 7).

Section snippets

State of the practice

SPLE is an approach to software engineering in which a set of products is built on a common set of core assets (Bosch, 2000, Clements and Northrop, 2002). SPLE draws upon principles similar to those that have been used for decades in most other industries, in which production includes the assembly of prefabricated parts. SPLE is claimed to have numerous benefits: large-scale productivity gains, decreased time-to-market, increased product quality, increased customer satisfaction, more efficient

Study context

CompNN is a medium-sized Norwegian software company that develops, maintains and markets a product line called ProdNN (real name made anonymous). The products derived from the product line are aimed at the high-end market of market and customer surveys. CompNN has a wide customer base that includes some of the world’s largest market research agencies. The company was established by three friends in 1996 and has since grown steadily, such that it now has about 90 employees and offices in Norway,

Rationale

As this study sought to investigate the diverse and complex topic of the fusion of product-line engineering and agile software development, which touches on a variety of factors, such as technology, architecture, process, market development, innovation, and management and organizational issues, we chose a qualitative approach. Our aim was to present a broad view and to explain how this fusion has worked in practice in actual industry, with a view to understanding how SPLE and ASD can be adopted

Findings – a holistic view of software engineering at CompNN

We now describe, from a holistic point of view, how CompNN develops and maintains their product platform. We have identified three distinct software processes and describe how they interact. Then we describe the product platform architecture and related services followed by a description of how the organization has shifted to this new development regime.

Discussion

The integrated software processes at CompNN support three key virtues of product development. (1) Technical excellence: an open and modular platform architecture implemented using industry-standard technology enables simple development and maintenance of the product line. (2) Market knowledge and relevance: the well organized, yet nimble strategic process provides adequate decision support for company management and guidance for the development projects. (3) Agility: the adoption of Evo, and

Conclusions

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze an industrial case to understand how SPLE and ASD can be combined and to clarify associated costs and gains.

We found that these two approaches, which at first sight may seem contradicting, in fact complement each other. SPLE and ASD work together, supporting strategic and tactical objectives, respectively. At CompNN, an operational process constitutes the experience-bearing link from the tactical to the strategic process, thus completing the

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank CompNN for their time and valuable inputs. We are also grateful to Chris Wright for proofreading. This work was done as part of the EVISOFT project funded by the Research Council of Norway under Grant 156701/220.

Geir Kjetil Hanssen works as a researcher on software process improvement and methodologies at SINTEF ICT, Norway’s largest independent research institution. He has a M.Sc. degree in informatics from the University of Trondheim and 3 years of industrial experience. Currently he also holds a position as Ph.D. student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

References (35)

P. Abrahamsson
Agile software development methods – Review and analysis
VTT Electronics
(2002)
E. Arisholm
Evaluating pair programming with respect to system complexity and programmer expertise
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
(2007)
K. Beck
Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
(2000)
A. Birk
Product line engineering, the state of the practice
Software, IEEE
(2003)
B. Boehm
A spiral model of software development and enhancement
IEEE Computer
(1988)
B. Boehm
Get ready for agile methods, with care
IEEE Computer
(2002)
B. Boehm et al.
Balancing Agility and Discipline – A Guide for the Perplexed
(2004)
J. Bosch
Design and Use of Software Architectures – Adopting and Evolving a Product-Line Approach
(2000)
J. Bosch
The challenges of broadening the scope of software product families
Communications of the ACM
(2006)
Carbon, R. et al., 2006. Integrating product line engineering and agile methods: flexible design up-front vs....

P.C. Clements et al.

Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns

(2002)

Cockburn, A., 2002. Agile Software Development. In: Cockburn, A. (Ed.), The Agile Software Development Series....

W.E. Deming

Out of the Crisis

(2000)

T. Dybå

Improvisation in small software organizations

IEEE Software

(2000)

H. Erdogmus et al.

On the effectiveness of the test-first approach to programming

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

(2005)

J. Erickson et al.

Agile modeling, agile software development, and extreme programming: the state of research

Journal of Database Management

(2005)

T.E. Fægri et al.

Collaboration and process fragility in evolutionarily product development

IEEE Software

(2007)

Cited by (64)

Empirical software product line engineering: A systematic literature review
2020, Information and Software Technology
The adoption of Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is usually only based on its theoretical benefits instead of empirical evidences. In fact, there is no work that synthesizes the empirical studies on SPLE. This makes it difficult for researchers to base their contributions on previous works validated with an empirical strategy.
The objective of this work is to discover and summarize the studies that have used empirical evidences in SPLE limited to those ones with the intervention of humans. This will allow evaluating the quality and to know the scope of these studies over time. Doing so, research opportunities can arise
A systematic literature review was conducted. The scope of the work focuses on those studies in which there is human intervention and were published between 2000 and 2018. We considered peer-reviewed papers from journals and top software engineering conferences.
Out of a total of 1880 studies in the initial set, a total of 62 primary studies were selected after applying a series of inclusion and exclusion criteria. We found that, approximately 56% of the studies used the empirical case study strategy while the rest used experimental strategies. Around 86% of the case studies were performed in an industrial environment showing the penetration of SPLE in industry.
The interest of empirical studies has been growing since 2008. Around 95.16% of the studies address aspects related to domain engineering while application engineering received less attention. Most of the experiments and case study evaluated showed an acceptable level of quality. The first study found dates from 2005 and since then, the interest in the empirical SPLE has increased.
Achieving agility and quality in product development - an empirical study of hardware startups
2020, Journal of Systems and Software
Citation Excerpt :
The combination of product line development, with the focus on upfront investments, planning, design, and Agile methods, with the highlight of rapid and frequent changes, attention to the design is found challenging (Misra et al., 2012). Several practices are investigated in the fusion of Agile methods into more rigid processes, including release planning (Hanssen and Fægri, 2008) and the bottom-up application driven approach with automated acceptance tests (Ghanam and Maurer, 2010). Research suggests that Agile methods are suitable for software startups, as iterative development approaches are adaptive, with short lead time (Pantiuchina et al., 2017; Paternoster et al., 2014).
Context: Startups aim at scaling their business, often by developing innovative products with limited human and financial resources. The development of software products in the startup context is known as opportunistic, agility-driven, and with high tolerance for technical debt. The special context of hardware startups calls for a better understanding of state-of-the-practice of hardware startups’ activities. Objective: This study aimed to identify whether and how startups can achieve product quality while maintaining focus on agility. Method: We conducted an exploratory study with 13 hardware startups, collecting data through semi-structured interviews and analysis of documentation. We proposed an integrative model of agility and quality in hardware startups. Results: Agility in hardware startups is complex and not achieved through adoption of fast-paced development practices alone. Hardware startups follow a quality-driven approach for development of core components, where frequent user testing is a measure for early debt management. Hardware startups often lack mindset and strategies for achieving long-term quality in early stages. Conclusions: Hardware startups need attention to hardware quality to allow for evolutionary prototyping and speed. Future research should focus on defining quality-driven practices that contribute to agility, and strategies and mindsets to support long-term quality in the hardware startup context.
Using a multi-method approach to understand agile software product lines
2015, Information and Software Technology
Software product lines (SPLs) and Agile are approaches that share similar objectives. The main difference is the way in which these objectives are met. Typically evidence on what activities of Agile and SPL can be combined and how they can be integrated stems from different research methods performed separately. The generalizability of this evidence is low, as the research topic is still relatively new and previous studies have been conducted using only one research method.
This study aims to increase understanding of Agile SPL and improve the generalizability of the identified evidence through the use of a multi-method approach.
Our multi-method research combines three complementary methods (Mapping Study, Case Study and Expert Opinion) to consolidate the evidence.
This combination results in 23 findings that provide evidence on how Agile and SPL could be combined.
Although multi-method research is time consuming and requires a high degree of effort to plan, design, and perform, it helps to increase the understanding on Agile SPL and leads to more generalizable evidence. The findings confirm a synergy between Agile and SPL and serve to improve the body of evidence in Agile SPL. When researchers and practitioners develop new Agile SPL approaches, it will be important to consider these synergies.
Agile portfolio management: An empirical perspective on the practice in use
2015, International Journal of Project Management
Citation Excerpt :
Collaboration based on recurring patterns of action is discussed by Leffingwell (2007) across team, program and portfolio levels, and by Vähäniitty et al. (2012) across “top management”, “strategic release management” and “software development management”. Further, Hanssen and Fægri (2008) discuss the integration of agile software development and software product line engineering to support the company's strategic and tactical goals by combining three interacting customer-centric processes: strategic (roadmapping, business cases), tactical (agile methods) and operational (day-to-day SE activities). “I see much more communication among I&A and the Business and also among departments of I&A.
Agile project management methods revolutionized the way how software projects are executed and organized. The question, however, on how to enable agility outside of individual projects and help larger organizations to compete with small entrepreneurial companies requires further attention. As a possible perspective, project portfolio management provides a global view on resources and their distribution across individual projects according to strategic choices. Based on 30 interviews conducted in 14 large European organizations this study contributes to the understanding of agile project management methods applied in IT project portfolios. First, we empirically identify the domains of practice. Then, guided by literature and our data we discuss the characteristics and implications of the agile portfolio management practice in our case organizations.
Challenges and potential benefits of adopting product line engineering in start-ups: A preliminary study
2022, Handbook of Re-Engineering Software Intensive Systems into Software Product Lines
Towards a component-based system model to improve the quality of highly configurable systems
2022, PeerJ Computer Science

View all citing articles on Scopus

Tor Erlend Fægri works as a researcher on software process improvement and software architecture at SINTEF ICT, Norway’s largest independent research institution. He has a M.Sc. degree in computing science from the University of Glasgow and 6 years of industrial experience. Currently he also holds a position as Ph.D. student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

View full text

Process fusion: An industrial case study on agile software product line engineering

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

State of the practice

Study context

Rationale

Findings – a holistic view of software engineering at CompNN

Discussion

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Agile software development methods – Review and analysis

VTT Electronics

Evaluating pair programming with respect to system complexity and programmer expertise

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

Product line engineering, the state of the practice

Software, IEEE

A spiral model of software development and enhancement

IEEE Computer

Get ready for agile methods, with care

IEEE Computer

Balancing Agility and Discipline – A Guide for the Perplexed

Design and Use of Software Architectures – Adopting and Evolving a Product-Line Approach

The challenges of broadening the scope of software product families

Communications of the ACM

Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns

Out of the Crisis

Improvisation in small software organizations

IEEE Software

On the effectiveness of the test-first approach to programming

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Agile modeling, agile software development, and extreme programming: the state of research

Journal of Database Management

Collaboration and process fragility in evolutionarily product development

IEEE Software