Migration to Software Product Line Development of Automotive Body Parts by Architectural Refinement with Feature Analysis

This paper presents a case study of migration to software product line development of automotive body parts from clone-and-own development at Aisin Seiki, an automotive body parts supplier. Feature analysis was conducted to recover the objectives of specification items, namely requirements, lost in the documents, and then separation of abstraction levels and concerns of the specification items and description of dependencies among the specification items were conducted. The results of the feature analysis provided guidance for structured analysis and development with data flow and state transition analyses to rebuild the product line architecture. These activities reduced the impact ratio of software structural changes for the targeted product to one-eighth of the conventional one and the development cost required for a variant to one-third than before. The costs required for these activities were recovered after the release of the third variant.