ABSTRACT
Executive summary: Product line engineering is a development methodology applied to families of related projects rather than to just one project. The idea is to use standard reusable components throughout the entire product line. Product line engineering is somewhat more complex than engineering a single application. However, in the modern world with rapidly increasing numbers of related software packages, this is a methodology that many companies need to understand. Custom designs and manual coding of software applications are intrinsically expensive and error prone. This statement is even more important for families of related applications. Examples of related families of similar applications include private branch exchange (PBX) switching systems, compilers, and many finance and insurance software applications.
