AppDev Advisor column on speeding up product family development

The August issue of the Application Development Advisor magazine features an article on automating product family development by Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM).

The article, in the practitioner-oriented 'Letters from the Front' column, is written by Juha-Pekka Tolvanen from MetaCase. It explains why current modelling languages - and indeed any 'one size fits all' method - are poorly suited to product family development, and shows how family-specific DSM provides a viable solution for quick and robust product family development. The basic lesson from the field is that the design language for describing variation among family members must map closely to the concepts and rules of the product family. "It makes the product family explicit, substantially increasing the speed of variant creation by between 500 and 1000%, and ensures that the family approach is followed de facto".