The software product line architecture: An empirical investigation of key process activities (original) (raw)

Quality and Value Analysis of Software Product Line Architectures

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies Special Session on Applications in Banking and Finance, 2008

The concern of a software product line architecture systematic analysis is how to take better advantage of views and analyze value and quality attributes in an organized and repetitive way. In this approach architecture descriptions evolve from the conceptual level to a more concrete level. Architecture analysis at the conceptual level provides a knowledge base of the domain architecture so as to perform a more comprehensive analysis of quality attributes at the concrete level description. Concrete architecture descriptions permit more relevant and accurate scenario-based analysis results for the development of quality attributes such as portability and adaptability.

Workshop on Variability in Software Product Line Architectures (VARI-ARCH 2010)

2010

A software product line is a collection of similar software systems that are constructed from a shared set of assets in a prescribed way. Software product lines are valued by industry as they increase productivity and enable strategic, planned reuse of assets among multiple products. The product line architecture is key to the success of a software product line. In contrast to single system architectures, a product line architecture is designed to underpin multiple systems.

Product-Line Architecture: New Issues for Evaluation

2005

In the product-line context, where a lack or mismatch in a quality attribute is potentially replicated among all products, product-line evaluation could detect problems before concrete products are developed. The life span of a software product-line architecture is much longer than the one of an ordinary software product and it serves as a basis for a set of related systems. Therefore, the product-line architecture should be adaptable to evolution as well as support a number of different products. All these characteristics set new requirements to the product-line architecture evaluation. This paper highlights the new issues that can arise when evaluating a product-line architecture versus evaluating a single-system architecture, including classifications of relevant attributes in product-line architecture evaluation, new evaluation moments and techniques. These issues are used as components of a framework to survey product-line architecture evaluation methods and metrics.

Some metrics to evaluate reusability of software product line architecture

Metrics have long been used to measure and evaluate software products and processes. Software product line architecture is a field in which few metrics have been applied, a surprising fact given the important role of software product line architecture in software product line development. Recently, Some metrics have been developed to assess software product line architecture. These metrics are useful but have not been widely used in industry. In this paper, some new metrics are provided to assess reusability of Software product line architecture. Our metrics are evaluated in a case study.

Product-line architectures in industry: a case study

1999

In this paper, a case study investigating the experiences from using product-line architectures is presented involving two swedish companies, Axis Communications AB and Securitas Larm AB. Key persons in these organisations have been interviewed and information has been collected from documents and other sources. The study identified a collection of problems and issues. The identified problems include the amount of required background knowledge, information distribution, the need for multiple versions of assets, dependencies between assets, use of assets in new contexts, documentation, tool support, management support and effort estimation. Issues collected from the case study are the questioned necessity of domain engineering units, business units versus development departments, time-to-market versus asset quality and common features versus feature superset. For each problem, a problem description, an example, underlying causes, available solutions and research issues are identified whereas for each issue the advantages and disadvantages of each side are discussed.

On the role of architectural design decisions in software product line engineering

Software Architecture, 2008

An increased attention to documenting architectural design decisions and their rationale has resulted in several approaches and prototype tools for capturing and managing architectural knowledge. However, most of them are focused on architecting single products and little attention has been paid to include design decisions in the context of product line architectures. This paper reports our work on analyzing the existing work on architectural design decisions for the specific needs of software product line engineering. We have ...

Evolution of product line architectures

2003

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available with respect to the evolution of the products, the software components and the software architecture. Due to the higher level of interdependency between the various software assets, software evolution is a more complex process. We identified characterization of software product lines based on dimensions of primary assets, views on the organization and on assets life cycle stages and after that introduced categorizations of the evolution of the requirements, the software architecture and the software components. Our work is focused on analyzing different ways of managing modifications during architecture evolution.