Why does it take that long? Establishing Product Lines in the Automotive Domain

The automotive industry supplies the world with a tremendous variability of vehicles, fulfilling a wide range of legal requirements all around the world while addressing their owner's needs and preferenqces from lowest cost to extreme luxury. As a global supplier in the powertrain domain, Bosch Gasoline Systems (GS) addresses this challenge by establishing a product line approach in the software development for gasoline engine control units, supported by process improvement initiative. Several characteristics of the powertrain domain strongly affected the feasible solutions and the time scale. Specific customer relations, complexity and variability of the physical system and a large organization require patience and continuity to be successful with product lines. The achievements of the GS approach are the ability of market oriented development, measurement of the product line success and a continuous control and improvement of product quality.