Experiences from identifying software reuse opportunities by domain analysis

In a large corporate organization there are sometimes similar software products in certain subdomains with a perceived functional overlap. This promises to be an opportunity for systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. In such situations companies have used different domain analysis approaches (e.g., SEI Technical Probe) that helped to assess technical and organizational potential for a software product line approach. We applied existing domain analysis approaches for software product line engineering and tailored them to include a feature analysis as well as architecture evaluation. In this paper, we report our experiences from applying the approach in two subdomains of industrial automation.