Small inexpensive core asset construction for large gainful product line development: Developing a communication system firmware product line

Product line development of communication system firmware with more than 2,000 features was performed in a large-scale project that involved more than 300 engineers (at a maximum) across four distributed sites. However, since intense demands to reduce development costs and time made it prohibitive to construct core assets for all those identified features, the project screened a limited number of the features, for which core assets were constructed, and then performed partial application of product line engineering. Nevertheless, when compared with previously engineered derivative developments, when the second product of the product line was released, it was clear that the project had achieved significant improvements in quality, as well as reductions in development costs and time requirements. Automatic code generation also contributed to those improvements.