Government Product Lines

Abstract

Government agencies often acquire large-scale software-intensive systems to be installed in many sites widely distributed across the country. These are often single-baseline systems that must be tailored to the particular environment of a site to allow for variations in both physical and functional configurations. Such systems often take a long time to develop and distribute to the sites; by the time the installations are completed, the system components are close to, or past obsolescence since technology is continuously evolving. This inevitably leads to a future “big bang” acquisition. This paper proposes that these problems can be resolved by considering the systems to be a product line that evolves incrementally, with new technology and functionality added over the lifetime of the product line. In this way the systems will remain state-of-the-shelf and avoid a future “big bang” acquisition.