IBIS – Interoperability in Business Information Systems -9- © IBIS – Issue 1 (1), 2006 Maturity Assessment Framework for Business Dimension of Software Product Family Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Western Ontario, London Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B9 fahmed@engga.uwo.ca , lcapretz@eng.uwo.ca Abstract: The software product family approach aims at curtailing the concept of “reinventing the wheel” in the software development process. The business has been highlighted as one of the critical dimensions in the process of software product family. This work presents an assessment framework for evaluating the business dimension of software product family process. Additionally, a software product family business evaluation tool has been designed and implemented on the basis of the presented framework. The tool preprocesses the data of key business factors, and it evaluates the overall business maturity of an organization. To demonstrate the application of the framework, and to determine the current software product family business performance, we conducted a case study of an organization actively involved in the business of software product family. The framework and the tool provide direct mechanisms to evaluate the current maturity level of software product family business of an organization. This research is a contribution towards establishing a comprehensive and unified strategy for a process evaluation of the software product family. Introduction The software product family has become one of the most promising practices with the potential to substantially increase the productivity of software development process. It has emerged as an attractive phenomenon within organizations dealing with software development. Software product family is a collection of software systems built from a common underlying architecture and a set of software assets in order to address the needs of a particular market segment. There are other corresponding terminologies for software product family, ones, which have been widely used in Europe and North America: for example, “product population”, “system families”, and “software product line”. Ommering [1] introduced the term “product population”, which is a collection of related systems based on similar technology but having many differences among them. The software product line is a comprehensive model for an organization building applications that are based on a common architecture and core assets [2]. Clements [3] defines the term “software product line” as a set of software systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment, and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way. The economic potentials of software product line have long been recognized in the software industry [4][5]. Clement et al. [6] reported that software product line engineering is a growing software engineering sub-discipline, and many organizations, including Philips, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Raytheon, and Cummins, are using it to achieve extraordinary gains in productivity, time to market, and product quality.