Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPL) promote reuse within an application domain in an organized fashion. Preimplemented software components are arranged according to a product line architecture (PLA). Balancing possibly conflicting quality attributes of all potential products makes PLA design a challenging task. Moreover, if quality attributes are part of the variabilities of the SPL, then a unique PLA may result highly inconvenient for particular configurations. We consider the PLA as a set of architectural decisions organized by the features in the Feature Model. A particular product architecture (PA) is defined as the subset of decisions associated to the chosen features for the product. Architectural knowledge is then reused among products and when new features are required in the SPL. Variability at the quality attribute level will impact the style of the resulting architecture, thus choosing different quality features will produce PAs following different styles, even within the same SPL. We use MDE techniques to operationalize this procedure and we illustrate the technique using the case of a Meshing Tool SPL. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.