Development and use of dynamic product-line architectures

Software product families are used to shorten time-to-market, improve quality and lower cost, by means of effective reuse. The paper presents the results of case study conducted at four Swedish companies that are involved in either the development of or development with a software product family. Several issues, such as inter-organisational development of platforms, platforms that employ dynamic reconfiguration, and platforms as a vehicle to achieve certain quality attributes, are identified and discussed. Issues are analysed, and it is demonstrated how these can be deduced as shortcomings in scoping and variability management for nonfunctional quality attributes and dynamic architectures.