Experiences with commonality control procedures to develop clinical instrument system

This paper reports our experience with software development based on the Software Product Line (SPL) approach employed for Clinical Instrument Integration Management Software (CIIMS). CIIMS is the system software which systemizes heterogeneous clinical instruments. These instruments require their particular management so that various parts of CIIMS are forced to be changed. This makes it difficult to create development plans to connect new instruments to CIIMS. In this paper we summarize a new estimate method called the Architecture Domain Matrix (ADM) method which effectively solved this problem in our experience. In ADM each architectural element is further decomposed into clinical operation flow elements and core assets of software are extracted from these elements. This method estimates the CIIMS commonality with precision and finally enables to successfully connect new instruments. In addition this method provides a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and supports development team building. WBS is generated by collecting all the changes for each operational flow element. A development team suitable for change is organized by taking into consideration all the changes for each architecture element. We integrated three different instruments into CIIMS in 18 months after applying this method to a real project and achieved 2.5 times greater productivity with the embedded software than that with our previous non-SPL process.