When 150% is too much: supporting product centric viewpoints in an industrial product line

Use of product lines promises easier production of varying products from a common base using the concepts of variation points and binding of these. This paper describes a successful industrial application of product line concepts based on the superset approach (aka 150%), where the success provided strong improvements in many aspects (e.g. product quality, amount of code to be maintained, time to delivery of new variants) but also introduced new challenges in the production of certain required product assets such as documentation or source code. We focus on the latter in this paper. We'll discuss the challenges which arose in the industrial use case from using the 150% superset approach with standard engineering programming languages and workflows and how the challenges have been solved. We evaluate our approach in a real industrial product line setting and the results show the effectiveness as well as the efficiency of the realized solution.