| Summary: |
The principal driver for defining and documenting design patterns is reuse i.e. to enable software engineers to reuse the wisdom, experience and practical designs learned by others who had solved similar problems. In earlier chapters, we implicitly assumed that the software product under construction was a one-off product within some system context. However, when organisations deliberately set out to make different variations of their software products, they are planning for change (see key design principles in Chapter 2), and strategically managed reuse becomes a necessity.
All the different product variations are known collectively as a software product line. A software product line consists of a software platform and a set of products that are derived from the platform. The platform is effectively a domain-specific pattern. Example software product lines include the software in printers, mobile phones, floating weather stations, car engine management systems, mortgage processing systems, domestic white goods e.g. microwaves, washing machines. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the software product line engineering. |
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