Assessment for quality product derivation from a software product line reference architecture

Reference Architecture (RA) in Software Product Lines (SPL) is the main artifact to derive concrete products. SPL is a family of software intensive systems or products sharing a common set of features satisfying a particular market sector, such as the Integrated Healthcare Information Systems domain. The Assessment Process (ASSPRO), goal of this work, concerns product configuration, the first stage of SPL product derivation, and starts with RA, a connected graph or valid architectural configuration built by a bottom-up process. Product configuration is selected among an optimal set of feasible solutions (FS), representing valid architectural configurations. Functional and non-functional customer requirements are considered, using weight-based heuristic assignment to select convenient FS. A problem in the SPL product derivation is to manage the huge amount of non-functional variants, which are identified in ASSPRO as solutions to satisfy precise quality requirements; variants’ choices are handled by applying appropriated strategies. The “best” FS is selected among an FS optimal set. ASSPRO does not pretend to compete with established industrial and academic SPL derivation approaches, but offers an agile way of specifying valid architectural configurations, meeting justified quality requirements; it is a “front-end” for the automatic product development stage