Evolution of product line architectures

Abstract

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.