Most products fit in a larger family of products. The members of such a product family share a lot of functionality and features. It is attractive to share implementations, designs etcetera between those members to increase the efficiency of the entire company. In practice many difficulties pop up when product developments become coupled, due to the partial developments which are shared. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a family approach based on shared developments and provides some methods to increase the chance on success. Distribution This article or presentation is written as part of the Gaud project. The Gaud project philosophy is to improve by obtaining frequent feedback. Frequent feedback is pursued by an open creation process. This document is published as intermediate or nearly mature version to get feedback. Further distribution is allowed as long as the document remains complete and unchanged. All Gaud documents are available at: http://www.extra.research.philips.com/natlab/sysarch/ version: 1.1 status: draft 24th September 2001 1 Why generic developments? Many people advocate generic developments, claiming a wide range of advantages, such as listed in table 1.

This book bundles the course descriptions of courses based on the Gaudi systems architecting material. The courses address systems architecting, stakeholders and requirements engineering.