An Environment for Managing Evolving Product Line Architectures

  • Authors:
  • Akash Garg;Matt Critchlow;Ping Chen;Christopher Van der Westhuizen;André van der Hoek

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '03 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The use of product lines is recognized as beneficial inpromoting and structuring both component and architecturereuse throughout an organization. While the businesspractices of using product lines are well-understood andrepresentations for specifying and capturing the underlyingarchitecture of a product line are coming of age, supportenvironments for managing the evolution of a productline architecture are still lacking. In this paper, wepresent Ménage, an environment specifically designed toalleviate this problem. Key features of Ménage are itssupport for: (1) specifying variation points in a productline architecture as optional and/or variant elements, (2)tracking the evolution of a product line architecture andits constituent elements through explicit versioning techniques,and (3) selecting one or more product architecturesout of an overall product line architecture by applyinguser-specified criteria. In this paper, we introduce theapproach underlying Ménage, discuss its detailed functionality,and demonstrate its use with a product line architecturefor entertainment systems.