Software Product Line Adoption Roadmap

The tremendous benefits of taking a software product line approach are well documented. Organizations have achieved significant reductions in cost and time to market and, at the same time, increased the quality of families of their software systems. However, to date, there are considerable barriers to organizational adoption of product line practices and to widespread product line practice. Phased adoption is attractive as a risk reduction and fiscally viable proposition. This report introduces a variant of the Factory Pattern called the Adoption Factory pattern that provides a generic roadmap to guide a manageable, phased product line adoption strategy. In addition, the report examines the Adoption Factory pattern from multiple useful views and describes how it can be used. The report concludes with a summary of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute's experiences with the pattern to date and its future plans with regard to the pattern.