Supporting product line development

The author considers how the maturation of the software development field has been inextricably tied to its adoption of a product line orientation. Only by specializing in a particular application domain can software development organizations develop the expertise required for that domain, develop cost effective products, and establish a market niche. He argues that software development processes are fundamentally flawed because maintenance, including enhancement and evolution, is performed on source code. This source code has been hand optimized by programmers and that optimization has spread information and built up implicit dependencies among the parts.