A Method for Software Product Platform Design Based on Features

Due to the increased competition and the advent of mass customization, software firms are applying the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) approach to provide product variety in a cost-effective manner. Although the key to designing a successful software product family is the product platform, yet there is lack of measures and methods that are useful to optimize the product platform design. This paper proposes a method to provide decision support to determine the optimized product platform design. The method targets at identifying the optimized product platform design in order to maximize the cost savings and the amount of commonality while meeting the goals and needs of the envisioned customers' segments. It generates, validates, and evaluates alternative product platform designs while considering market concerns (e.g., customer preferences) and technical product platform concerns (e.g., decisions regarding shared features, economic benefit). We demonstrate its applicability with an example of platform design problem in smart phones domain.