A case study of applying software product line engineering to the air conditioner domain

Abstract

Software development for embedded products requires high quality, high productivity, and short delivery time because of strong business demands. Although software product line engineering (SPLE) is widely recognized as a good approach for systematic reuse of software, few reports present the information needed for other organizations to implement SPLE. This paper describes a case study of applying SPLE to a product family of air-conditioners, including the effects on degree of implementation of SPLE'S three essential activities (domain engineering, application engineering, and management) and its evaluation over the long period. The use of an incomplete implementation of SPLE's three essential activities temporally improves the productivity of the application developments due to the effect of refactored software, but this gradually decreases through architecture erosion.