Software Mass Customization

Building a product line to meet the diverse and changing needs of a market

This website explores the nature of software as an engineering and manufacturing discipline. It describes a tailorable approach for efficiently building effective high-quality products and systems and provides guidance on how to adopt such an approach. The one-of-a-kind and one-size-fits-all approaches that most people use today make sense only for supporting fixed, well-understood needs. Most customers have poorly understood, changing needs that are often similar but seldom identical to what other customers need. We envision a comprehensive methodology for the rapid engineering and manufacture of customized, easily-modified products that will serve the needs of a targeted market. The concepts and practices discussed here will interest managers and engineers who want to help their organizations significantly improve their software capabilities.

The Domain-specific Engineering^TM (DsE) methodology is a systematic approach, starting from explicit business objectives, for mass producing customized products. Anyone who builds software-based products or systems for a coherent market would benefit from adopting and tailoring this approach to suit their needs and capabilities:

The DsE approach is described in more detail from 3 perspectives:

• Domain-specific Engineering^TM Processes - The workings of domain and application engineering in DsE and how these interact to form a capability for producing a line of similar customized and changable products
• Reuse-driven Process Improvement^TM (PI_r) - A method for process adoption, providing a detailed roadmap for instituting and continuously improving a DsE product line capability appropriate to an organization's business objectives
• MetaSynthesis^TM for Adaptable Software - A method and family of tools for creating and using adaptable components in DsE, as a means for flexible reuse in the rapid production of customized products.

The DsE methodology represents substantial experience working with a variety of organizations in the U.S. and Europe. DsE itself is not a one-size-fits-all approach: following the PI_r method, adopters can tailor and scale their use of DsE to suit their business context and accommodate their preferred technical practices.

A Larger Context: The Industrial Revolution, Phase 3