A make/buy/reuse feature development framework for product line evolution

In software product lines, feature development options can be categorized as make or buy or, a variation on buy, called reuse. In transaction economic cost theory a group of features is an asset and there is an increasing correlation between an asset’s relative importance to a supplier and the decision to make rather than buy. In this paper we argue that the make or buy decision should also consider an asset’s relative importance to the set of customers who buy the products containing the asset and we present a decision-making feature development framework that factors in feature relative importance to supplier and customer. To evaluate our framework we compared its recommendations with actual decisions made on three different industrial product lines. Our results showed broad consistency between framework guidance and actual practice, but revealed some instances not adequately explained by the framework.