Folgende Erfahrungen machte die Firma Philips Medical Systems (Eine Tochter von Philips Niederlande) bei der Produktlinienentwicklung:
Philips verwendet explizite Variationspunkte um die Produktspezifika zu charakterisieren. Zur Charakterisierung der Architektur der Systeme werden Qualitätsfaktoren verwendet. Der Philips Ansatz ist für Reife Domänen mit wohldefinierten Requirements und relativ wenig Evolution geeignet.
Der folgende Text ist übernommen aus Product Line State of the Practice Report:
"
Practices at Philips Medical Philips Medical supports a product line of medical imaging systems. These systems are characterized by
maturity and complexity
life criticality
small numbers of systems
collaboration across many domains including hardware design, information technology (IT) infrastructure for integration into hospital systems, medical application experts, and mechanical designers
Philips has developed this product line consolidating the work of over 100 developers across several departments. These departments previously developed products in isolation, with little commonality in underlying concepts. These projects were developed over a period of several years. Their complexity required a durable architecture that could survive changes over their lifetime of 10 years or more.
Philips has formalized several practices for institutionalizing the product line approach, including the development of various requirements and object models. Their models must be independent of any single-system implementation to support their use across the product line.
Philips uses the term variation point to characterize the specific factors that will vary from one system in the product line to another. A variation point also defines a high-level concept and specializes that concept for individual instances. Variation points may exist for many devices in a specific system; while one system may have none, others may have three or four of the devices. There may also be attributes common to the product line that take on different values for each system.
Philips uses quality factors to characterize the architecture of its product line. Specifically, the architecture must be able to
support integration of new functions and peripherals
provide extensions of the system without a requirement for system-wide upgrades
enable efficient testing that does not require the testing of all possible configurations of functions and peripherals
Philips applies a component-based approach where components are tested and replaced in isolation. Philips has had limited experience with this approach. This approach appears to support the isolation of updates that are required when peripherals are changed. Philips is confident that the approach works in mature areas with well-defined requirements and relatively slow evolution. The approach, which may not be appropriate in market areas with rapid changes due to new technology, supports variation in functions and capabilities for more powerful hardware and peripherals."
Aus : "Product Line State of the Practice Report" Sholom Cohen, Technischer Report CMI/SEI-2002-TN-017, Software Engineering Institute, USA