[1][2] The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute defines a software product line as "a set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way.
For example, automotive manufacturers can create unique variations of one car model using a single pool of carefully designed parts and a factory specifically designed to configure and assemble those parts.
[4] Recent advances in the software product line field have demonstrated that narrow and strategic application of these concepts can yield order of magnitude improvements in software engineering capability.
[citation needed] The result is often a discontinuous jump in competitive business advantage[citation needed], similar to that seen when manufacturers adopt mass production and mass customization paradigms.
This is reflected by the emergence of industry standard families like ISO 265xx on systems and software engineering practices for product lines.