The state of the practice of systematic software development / product line development in Germany

This report has presented the results of a survey to investigate product line potential in Germany. The survey was performed within the VSEK project and has been answered by 129 people belonging to industry contacts of the Fraunhofer IESE and the VSEK project. The data collected from the survey is presented at different levels. We present the raw data in order to give an overview on the participants and their contexts and their experiences with reuse and product lines. Then we present the results of statistically analyzing the hypotheses we had. As a general conclusion we see that the causes for reuse and the contexts where reuse is done are manifold. Some of the hypotheses we had did not hold at all (e.g. the relation of lifetime and architecture) but on the other hand reuse and product line development is seen as a successful means to overcome development problems.