A Concrete Method for Developing and Applying Product Line Architectures

Abstract

Software development organizations are often deterred from introducing product line architectures by the lack of simple, ready-to-use methods for developing and applying them. The well-known, published product-line-engineering methods tend to focus on the early stages of the software life cycle and address product line issues at a high-level of abstraction. Connecting product-line concepts with established implementation technologies is thus largely left to the user.

This paper introduces a method, known as the KobrA method, which addresses this problem by enabling product line concerns to be coupled with regular (nonproduct line) architectural artifacts, and thus introduced incrementally. By explaining how the method can be understood as a concrete instantiation of the well-established PuLSE-DSSA product-line architecture approach, the paper clarifies the product line features of the KobrA method and illustrates how they can be used in tandem with established, general-purpose product line methods.