A product line organization using an open development method

Opening access to the source code for a product is a business strategy that is increasingly used as the basis for innovative collaborations with stakeholders. The strategy has been successful at producing a large quantity of high-quality software. A tactic in this strategy is to effectively use the efforts of many widely dispersed professionals. The processes, software tools and the communication mechanisms used to facilitate concurrent development by a large number of people are of as much interest as the software being created. In this position paper we present our view of how a software product line organization might operate if it used an open development method (ODM) but is not necessarily producing open source software. We will describe a hypothetical product line (HPL), which is part speculation, part our experience, and partly the experience of others.