Talk:Product-family engineering

Why is there a 'Family Member' defined in the model? No documents are associated and is is 1-on-1 associated with a product. Why not model a 'Product Line' having 0 or mode 'Product's? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.89.226.18 (talk) 11:23, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

As far as I understand it there is a difference between the "concept of a product", which is the "member", and the "product" itself. While the concept is quite stable the product is not. However: the product is supposed to change when the member does. So, as I see it, this expresses the relationship between concept and technical realization.

Also the "Family Member" is something defined in front of the product itself. If one interprets the diagram as a time line, then the family member would be defined prior to the "product engineering" process.

Some other issue: the "common requirements" are really worth a few more words as they are often misunderstood. The article should stress more that "common requirements" are actually common "technical" requirements. Examples: user authentication, user management, database access and more. It is really necessary to stress that, while most software is build core to periphery, requirements engineers have a tendency to look at the periphery first (e.g. we need reporting here and also there), which causes much trouble. If report A is a financial report created from a small excel sheet and Report B is a marketing report created from a Data Warehouse database with 2 GB of statistical data, then these are NOT common requirements. Just look at the example of Nokia in the text. These are technical common requirements. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.53.193.127 (talk) 21:48, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Not just software
There is a strong implication in this article that this concept applies only to software, but it is commonly used in non-software manufacturing. I have personally worked on product families in the contexts of televisions and automobiles. KeithC (talk) 07:30, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Not synonymous with Domain engineering
The first paragraph says that PFE is synonymous with domain engineering (if it were, it would not need a separate page), but the body of the article clearly has domain engineering as a subset of PFE KeithC (talk) 07:34, 2 June 2011 (UTC)