How long before the approach pays off?
That’s a hard question to answer, because it depends on too many organization-specific conditions. If you have decided to build products for which there is no market, no matter how efficiently you build them, you will not make money. However, a slightly different form of the question can be asked: How many products are required before building them as a product line is more cost-effective than building them as separate systems? The answer to that question lies somewhere in the neighborhood of two or three systems. That is, if your product set is expected to be populated by three or more systems, you’re almost certainly better off to build them as a software product line than as separate systems. (See “It Takes Two,” [Clements 2002c, p. 226].
That’s a hard question to answer, because it depends on too many organization-specific conditions. If you have decided to build products for which there is no market, no matter how efficiently you build them, you will not make money. However, a slightly different form of the question can be asked: How many products are required before building them as a product line is more cost-effective than building them as separate systems? The answer to that question lies somewhere in the neighborhood of two or three systems. That is, if your product set is expected to be populated by three or more systems, you’re almost certainly better off to build them as a software product line than as separate systems. (See “It Takes Two,” [Clements 2002c, p.
