Software Engineering Institute

A software product line is 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. Producing a set of related products as a product line has allowed organizations to achieve increased quality and significant reductions in cost and time to market. See, for example, the success stories in the Software Product Line Hall of Fame. Software product lines epitomize the concept of strategic, planned reuse.

The SEI and others have worked to lower the adoption barrier by codifying practices, writing case studies, perfecting methods useful in product line approaches, and engendering a software product line community. The business-focused, architecture-centric fundamentals of our product lines work remain as relevant today as ever, though the details require some adaptation to match an organization's context. To assist in broader adoption, we are making our educational materials freely available to the software engineering community.

The materials from all three of the courses in our software product line curriculum are now freely available. They complement our existing software product lines collection of technical reports, white papers, and presentations. While the SEI book Software Product Lines is no longer in print, much of its content is available in the product lines collection, including the Framework for Software Product Line Practice and two of the case studies.