Governing Software Product Lines and Reorganizations

It’s a fact of life that organizations love to reorganize. Reorganizations have a profound effect on the way product lines are governed. We introduce the concept of the Responsibility, Authority, and Accountability (RAA) network. An RAA network assists in the governance process of product lines for internal information systems, even in the face of massive reorganization. Armour (“Reorg Cycle” [1]) describes the pressures of reorganization to balance the “dimensions of organization” (e.g., geography, customers, product technology); we apply polarity management to balance the dimensions. Armour describes the difficulty of applying hierarchical organization charts—“single dimension management structures”—to the above “multidimensional environments”; we apply lean RAA networks to span organization charts and provide the multidimensional view needed for product lines. Armour observes that network organization approaches “do not have a good track record”; our experience is that lean, resilient RAA networks document the product line’s governance architecture. These governance architecture patterns are applied repeatedly to the strata of products in the product line. We present the governance architect’s RAA to define, monitor, and sustain governance health using these tools: polarity maps, polarity networks, RAA maps, and RAA networks.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Boeing Commercial Airplanes, P.O. Box 3707, Seattle, WA, 98124-3707, USA

   Truman M. Jolley, David J. Kasik & Tammy R. Ben

Editors and Affiliations

1. Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 4500 Fifth Avenue, 15213, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

   Robert L. Nord

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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