Integrating Features in the Development of Software Product Line Architecture

Abstract—Product line architecture (PLA) is an important application of software architecture in software product line engineering. This paper presents an approach that addresses two existing issues in PLA development: 1) the difficulty of relating a product line feature to PLA elements, and 2) the overhead of manually developing variation points included in a PLA. The approach integrates features specification into the PLA model, and includes a PLA modeling tool called ArchFeature that supports side-by-side development of features, PLA, and their relationships. ArchFeature can automatically establish the feature-PLA relationship, create and maintain variation points in PLA, and highlight the PLA elements related to a feature. It was used in a case study to develop a full-featured architecture model for the Apache Solr software system. Keywords—software architecture; software product line; architecture modeling I