Software Resource Consumption Engineering for Mass Produced Embedded System Families.

Software product line engineering is one approach to reuse software and achieve large scale development cost reductions. The use of product line engineering in an embedded system context may increase the software resource consumption, i.e. the required memory and the execution time of the software, such that a larger and more expensive microcontroller must be used. Particularly for large production quantities, the additional expenses may result in an overall loss.
This Ph.D. thesis addresses the risk of increased total cost due to product line engineering in several ways. An extension to existing cost models is presented that enables the calculation of the cost threshold beyond which product lines result in a loss. The software resource consumption engineering method is defined and applied to systematically reduce the software resource consumption of software architectures.
Various examples and case studies conducted in an industrial context validate the thesis. Among them is the validation of the significance of the cost threshold, the application of the presented method, and an experimental setting organizations should consider to successfully introduce software product line engineering in a mass production setting.