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Moving FAST Forward

By David Rubinstein

August 15, 2005 — (Page 1 of 3)
Creating software is hard enough. Tweaking it to create a software product line—multiple versions of the same product for different platforms, different feature sets, different pricing and different customer branding—can quickly get out of control. Imagine if every time Toyota wanted to release one Camry with automatic transmission and another with a five-speed manual stick, or one red and another silver, the company’s engineers had to redesign the car, and draw up a new set of specifications, and that all the components, such as side-view mirror motors and the interior speakers, would have to be re-tested. I’m sure that before you could say “You’ve got it, Toyota,” the company would stop offering options.

Software product line development is no different. It grew out of research done in the 1990s to define a methodology for reusing software assets effectively and efficiently. Visionaries such as David Weiss, then of Bell Laboratories, believed that reuse in software product line development should require that a software artifact only be created when the reuse of the asset can be assured across the product line. (Most other asset reuse plans simply call for placing all software components in a repository in the hopes that someone else in the organization can find a project to reuse the asset in someday.)

The idea back then was to look at this kind of development as creating different members of a family, taking advantage of work done in previous iterations to eliminate rework, rather than creating a whole new project each time requirements change. This family-oriented approach to development, where the abstractions between versions are described, specified and then translated into deliverable software, came to be known as the FAST process.

Fast-forward to today, and the reality is that the process of developing product-line software is anything but fast. Data extrapolated from Software Engineering Institute case studies indicates that as much as 50 percent of development time is eaten up dealing with issues surrounding multiplicity. A software company called BigLever wants to change that by assigning first-class problem status to variations in a software product line.

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