Software Product Platform with Product Families

Product platform concept is not new within the physical manufacturing world. Automobile industry, printer industry, drill industry has utilized the concept for years with success. Within software products business, the concept of product platform is not new, but not many has been able to implement a product platform and not many has been able to use the platform as basis for derivative product development (software product family).

My research of software platform development dates back to 1997 and 1998 when I was part of a doctoral group that studied product platforms in a few case study companies. Some of these companies were able to demonstrate some shape or form of product platform development, but many of them were in very initial stages.

In my research, I selected one specific domain (analytical application software) to review how software product platform concept could be utilized as development strategy. My research findings were encouraging and the work included also a thorough literature study of software product family development, component-based development with associated topics.

The abstract and press releases of this work can be found from this link.in Finnish and here in English. If you want to download the entire dissertation in English, you can do if from here.

What I found to be very encouraging was that my research got nice publicity from several Finnish IT and business magazines. Digitoday.fi, a Finnish portal, wrote an article about the concept. The largest weekly business publication Talouselamä wrote an article about internationalization of Finnish companies and how a product platform can be used in software business. And finally, a local paper in my dear hometown Kotka wrote about my career and the doctoral defense in http://www.verkkopoiju.com/ paper and portal.

The work in this topic will continue. I believe that the concept of software product platform will increase in its importance going forward. Software will be embedded in our daily life in one way or the other and software vendors have to identify new means to develop software. One very prospective approach is domain-specific modeling that enables software vendors to create derivative software products and therefore enable quick reaction to market changes and tastes without having to re-develop the entire application. An entire site of this topic can be found at http://www.dsmforum.org/ and I encourage you to subscribe to RSS feeds from the site.