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Efficient development and maintenance of similar, but not identical customised software products

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CUSTOMIZE reduces the life-cycle cost of products in a series of similar, but not identical, customised software applications. The life-cycle cost has been reduced by putting more effort into the development of the base software. Re-usability of source code, configurability and maintenance are the main items of interest. A particular benefit of the methods presented is reduction in implementation time, approximately 30-60% reduction in source code. Further on, costs related to developing mutant versions of the original base software are drastically reduced due to the use of configurable systems and databases. The baseline project is the development of PC-based CAD-robot interface software for automatic off-line programming of a Motoman SK16 robot based on NUPAS CAD/CAM files. The robot's task domain is oxygen acetylene cutting of ship profiles. The base software was delivered to a customer (a Norwegian shipyard) in February 1998. Some of the findings have already been successfully employed in revisions and upgrades of other software products in the TTS organisation. We firmly believe that we have selected a set of suitable techniques for handling similar, but not identical software products. We have experience with these methods from the experiment and from two pre-tests during upgrades of existing products. This experience indicates that life-cycle costs on similar, but not identical software are significantly reduced. The result is being used for all TTS robot software developments. The methods should be of particular interest to companies developing software that must meet different requirements for different customers.

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