Improving the production capability of product line organizations by architectural design for producibility

Software production today is not treated by organizations with similar priority than research and development as it is usual in other industries like, for instance, the car industry. Even if organizations apply a software product line approach they often focus more on the development of a comprehensive reuse infrastructure than on planning for production of their products. Consequently, application engineering is not as efficient as expected and the investment in reuse potentially never pays off. In this dissertation research an approach to improve the production capability of software product line organizations is developed. Thereby, production planning will be addressed as soon as during family engineering. The product line architecture will be designed to be producible, i.e., the architecture and the planned production process are aligned to each other. The production aspects are captured in a new architectural viewpoint called the production viewpoint of the architecture that addresses the concerns of production planners