Comparison of Software Product Line Architecture Design Methods: COPA, FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA

  • Authors:
  • Mari Matinlassi

  • Affiliations:
  • VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Product line architectures (PLAs) have been undercontinuous attention in the software research communityduring the past few years. Although several methods havebeen established to create PLAs there are not availablestudies comparing PLA methods. Five methods are knownto answer the needs of software product lines: COPA,FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA. In this paper, anevaluation framework is introduced for comparing PLAdesign methods. The framework considers the methodsfrom the points of view of method context, user, structureand validation. Comparison revealed distinguishableideologies between the methods. Therefore, methods donot overlap even though they all are PLA design methods.All the methods have been validated on various domains.The most common domains are telecommunicationinfrastructure and information domains. Some of themethods apply software standards; at least OMGýs MDAfor method structures, UML for language and IEEE Std-1471-2000 for viewpoint definitions.