From Legacy Systems to Software Product Lines: A Bottom-Up Perspective

This talk explores how a bottom‑up Software Product Line (SPL) was successfully established by systematically extracting variability from a large, existing industrial codebase and transforming it into a unified platform. The session highlights how feature modeling and variability management enabled the transition from a small set of products to a broad family of Danfoss Drives solutions—while keeping complexity under control and improving overall software quality.

A particular emphasis is placed on the practical use of tools for managing variation points, modeling domain concepts, and generating consistent artifacts across the platform. Drawing on real-world experience, the speakers will discuss why SPL adoption is not only a technical challenge but also an organizational one. Topics include starting small, engaging engineers directly, and introducing variability in incremental, manageable steps.

Participants will gain insights into concrete lessons learned, common pitfalls to avoid, and why a bottom‑up approach is especially well‑suited for embedded software development.

Speakers

Thomas Fogdal
Head of Electronics and Software at HAMAG A/S. Formerly Embedded Software Platform Manager at Danfoss Drives, where he played a key role in establishing and governing the embedded Software Product Line that this talk is based on.

Krzysztof Sierszecki
Associate Professor at SDU Software Engineering in Sønderborg. Previously Software Architect at Danfoss Drives, where he contributed to the introduction of SPL practices and variability management in large-scale embedded systems.