An empirical foundation for product flexibility

Product flexibility has gained recent attention in companies, which design products for rapidly changing technologies and which are under constant pressure to frequently upgrade their products. In this paper, we develop a method to evaluate product flexibility by performing an empirical study that examines the dependency of flexibility on the number of parts, functions, interfaces, types of interfaces, modules, and the manner of module arrangement. Additionally, a set of guidelines is derived from this study to aid in designing for flexibility.