Case study of applying SPLE to development of network switch products

Software product line engineering has spread as a technique for promoting the efficient development of embedded products with many product line-ups. During the development of network switch products at Hitachi Metals, Ltd., the number of development man-months increased as the number of product line-ups increased. Therefore, we shifted our development paradigm to product line development for efficient product development. We classified software assets as implementation assets, test assets, and design assets, and from these three assets, we extracted common objects and integrated them as reusable elements. By doing so, we promoted the efficient development of software assets and reduced the contradictions between the contents of the software assets. As a result, we reduced the amount of the source code by 53.1%. In this paper, we discuss the details of our technique and the effect of applying it. In addition, we discuss how you can apply our technique in the development of other products.