Product Family Engineering

Product family engineering (PFE), also known as product line engineering, is a synonym for "domain engineering" created by the Software Engineering Institute, a term coined by James Neighbors in his 1980 dissertation at University of California, Irvine. Software product lines are quite common in our daily lives, but before a product family can be successfully established, an extensive process has to be followed. This process is known as product family engineering.

Product family engineering can be defined as a method that creates an underlying architecture of an organization's product platform. It provides an architecture that is based on commonality as well as planned variabilities. The various product variants can be derived from the basic product family, which creates the opportunity to reuse and differentiate on products in the family.

Product family engineering is a relatively new approach to the creation of new products. It focuses on the process of engineering new products in such a way that it is possible to reuse product components and apply variability with decreased costs and time. Product family engineering is all about reusing components and structures as much as possible.

Several studies have proven that using a product family engineering approach for product development can have several benefits (Carnegie Mellon (SEI), 2003). Here is a list of some of them:

• Higher productivity
• Higher quality
• Faster time-to-market
• Lower labor needs

The Nokia case mentioned below also illustrates these benefits.