Effects of reuse on schedule, quality, and market share in software product line

Abstract

Software product line needs large investments. If some organization wants to adopt software product line, they should consider the investments and benefits carefully. The software product line researches of economical efficiency estimates investments and benefits before adopting software product line. An organization can make a decision of adopting software product line based on these results. Therefore, the results should be appropriate. However, current researches have a limitation in estimating investments and benefits. It is not difficult to estimate investments Therefore, most of those researches estimate software product line investments and effort savings by comparing it with single product development. Estimating software product line investments and effort savings are parts of economical efficiency research. However, there is no indirect savings of the increment of market share, which derived from direct savings. For instance, if an organization reduces product development time using software product line, the organization will capture higher market share than other competitors. To estimate how much benefits will occur from software product line, effects of reuse on schedule, quality, and market share should be estimated. The purpose of this thesis is to estimate benefits of software product line, which are effort, schedule, quality, productivity, and market share. As a result, an organization can predict the effects of reuse in software product line based on core asset base’s reusability. This thesis provides quantifiable models of schedule, quality, and market share; implemented model in Microsoft Excel sheet, model’s validation, and some examples.