Assessing merge potential of existing engine control systems into a product line

Engine Control Systems (ECS) for automobiles have many variants for many manufactures and several markets. To improve their development efficiency, exploiting ECS commonalities and predicting their variability are mandatory. The concept of software product line engineering meets this ECS business background. However, we should carefully investigate the expected technical, economical, and organizational effects of introducing the strategy into existing products. Thereafter, a strategy will be derived systematically and realize the desired benefits. This paper reports an experience with the up-front investigation performed for Hitachi's ECS. We focus on the approach to plan the migration of the existing family of individual systems into a future product line. The approach assesses potential ways of merging software from existing variants and eventually defines a procedure for performing the migration. To get a high quality strategy, we integrate the approach of software measurement, the expertise of software architects, and reverse engineering techniques.